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NOTES  OF  A 
SON  AND  BROTHER 


BY 

HENRY    JAMES 


ILLUSTRATED 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES   SCRIBNER'S   SONS 
1914 


COPYRIGHT,  1914,  BY 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


Published  March,  1914 


ILLUSTRATIONS 


Pencil-drawn  portrait  of  William  James  by  himself,  about 

1866 Frontispiece 


FACING 
PAGE 


Louis  Osborne.     Sketch  from  a  letter  of  William  James 

(page  18)  . 18 

Portrait  in  oils  of  Miss  Katherine  Temple,  1861    ....       96 
A  leaf  from  the  letter  quoted  on  page  129 130 

Sketch  of  G.  W.  James  brought  home  wounded  from  the  as 
sault  on  Fort  Wagner 344 

"The  cold  water   cure  at  Divonne — excellent   for  melan 
cholia."— From  a  letter  of  William  James  (page  447)    .     448 


NOTES   OF   A   SON   AND   BROTHER 


IT  may  again  perhaps  betray  something  of  that 
incorrigible  vagueness  of  current  in  our  edu 
cational  drift  which  I  have  elsewhere1  so 
unreservedly  suffered  to  reflect  itself  that,  though 
we  had  come  abroad  in  1855  with  an  eye  to 
the  then  supposedly  supreme  benefits  of  Swiss 
schooling,  our  most  resolute  attempt  to  tap  that 
supply,  after  twenty  distractions,  waited  over 
to  the  autumn  of  the  fourth  year  later  on,  when 
we  in  renewed  good  faith  retraced  our  steps  to 
Geneva.  Our  parents  began  at  that  season  a 
long  sojourn  at  the  old  Hotel  de  1'Ecu,  which  now 
erects  a  somewhat  diminished  head  on  the  edge 
of  the  rushing  Rhone  —  its  only  rival  then  was 
the  H6tel  des  Bergues  opposite,  considerably 
larger  and  commanding  more  or  less  the  view  of 
that  profiled  crest  of  Mont-Blanc  which  used  to 
be  so  oddly  likened  to  the  head  and  face  of  a 
singularly  supine  Napoleon.  But  on  that  side 
the  shooting  blue  flood  was  less  directly  and 
familiarly  under  the  windows;  in  our  position 

1  A  Small  Boy  and  Others.     New  York,  1913. 

1 


£      NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

we  lived  with  it  and  hung  over  it,  and  its  beauty, 
just  where  we  mainly  congregated,  was,  I  fear, 
my  own  sole  happy  impression  during  several 
of  those  months.  It  was  of  a  Sunday  that  we 
congregated  most;  my  two  younger  brothers 
had,  in  general,  on  that  day  their  sortie  from  the 
Pensionnat  Maquelin,  a  couple  of  miles  out  of 
town,  where  they  were  then  established,  and 
W.  J.,  following  courses  at  the  Academy,  in  its 
present  enriched  and  amplified  form  the  Univer 
sity,  mingled,  failing  livelier  recreation,  in  the 
family  circle  at  the  hotel.  Livelier  recreation, 
during  the  hours  of  completest  ease,  consisted 
mostly,  as  the  period  drew  itself  out,  of  those 
courses,  along  the  lake  and  along  the  hills,  which 
offer  to  student-life  in  whatever  phase,  through 
out  that  blest  country,  the  most  romantic  of  all 
forms  of  "a  little  change";  enjoyed  too  in  some 
degree,  but  much  more  restrictedly,  by  myself 
-  this  an  effect,  as  I  remember  feeling  it,  of 
my  considerably  greater  servitude.  I  had  been 
placed,  separately,  at  still  another  Institution, 
that  of  M.  Rochette,  who  carried  on  an  Ecole 
Preparatoire  aux  Ecoles  Speciales,  by  which  was 
meant  in  particular  the  Polytechnic  School  at 
Zurich,  with  whatever  other  like  curricula,  always 
"scientific,"  might  elsewhere  be  aimed  at;  and 
I  had  been  so  disposed  of  under  a  flattering  mis 
conception  of  my  aptitudes  that  leaves  me  to-day 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER      3 

even  more  wonderstruck  than  at  that  immediate 
season  of  my  distress. 

I  so  feared  and  abhorred  mathematics  that  the 
simplest  arithmetical  operation  had  always  found 
and  kept  me  helpless  and  blank  —  the  dire  dis 
cipline  of  the  years  bringing  no  relief  whatever 
to  my  state;  and  mathematics  unmitigated  were 
at  the  Institution  Rochette  the  air  we  breathed, 
building  us  up  as  they  most  officiously  did  for 
those  other  grim  ordeals  and  pursuits,  those  of 
the  mining  and  the  civil  engineer,  those  of  the 
architectural  aspirant  and  the  technician  in  still 
other  fields,  to  which  we  were  supposed  to  be 
addressed.  Nothing  of  the  sort  was  indeed  sup 
posed  of  me  —  which  is  in  particular  my  present 
mystification;  so  that  my  assault  of  the  pre 
liminaries  disclosed,  feeble  as  it  strikingly  re 
mained,  was  mere  darkness,  waste  and  anguish. 
I  found  myself  able  to  bite,  as  the  phrase  was, 
into  no  subject  there  deemed  savoury;  it  was 
hard  and  bitter  fruit  all  and  turned  to  ashes  in 
my  mouth.  More  extraordinary  however  than 
my  good  parents'  belief  —  eccentric  on  their  part 
too,  in  the  light  of  their  usual  practice  and 
disposition,  their  habit,  for  the  most  part,  of  liking 
for  us  after  a  gasp  or  two  whatever  we  seemed  to 
like  —  was  my  own  failure  to  protest  with  a  frank 
ness  proportioned  to  my  horror.  The  stiffer 
intellectual  discipline,  the  discipline  of  physics 


4      NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

and  of  algebra,  invoked  for  the  benefit  of  an 
understanding  undisputedly  weak  and  shy,  had 
been  accepted  on  my  side  as  a  blessing  perhaps 
in  disguise.  It  had  come  to  me  by  I  know  not 
what  perversity  that  if  I  couldn't  tackle  the 
smallest  problem  in  mechanics  or  face  without 
dismay  at  the  blackboard  the  simplest  geometric 
challenge  I  ought  somehow  in  decency  to  make 
myself  over,  oughtn't  really  to  be  so  inferior  to 
almost  everyone  else.  That  was  the  pang,  as 
it  was  also  the  marvel  —  that  the  meanest  minds 
and  the  vulgarest  types  approached  these  matters 
without  a  sign  of  trepidation  even  when  they 
approached  them,  at  the  worst,  without  positive 
appetite.  My  attempt  not  therefore  to  remain 
abnormal  wholly  broke  down,  however,  and  when 
I  at  last  withdrew  from  the  scene  it  was  not 
even  as  a  conspicuous,  it  was  only  as  an  obscure, 
a  deeply  hushed  failure.  I  joined  William,  after 
what  had  seemed  to  me  an  eternity  of  woe,  at 
the  Academy,  where  I  followed,  for  too  short  a 
time  but  with  a  comparative  recovery  of  con 
fidence,  such  literary  cours  as  I  might. 

I  puzzle  it  out  to-day  that  my  parents  had 
simply  said  to  themselves,  in  serious  concern,  that 
I  read  too  many  novels,  or  at  least  read  them  too 
attentively  —  that  was  the  vice;  as  also  that  they 
had  by  the  contagion  of  their  good  faith  got  me 
in  a  manner  to  agree  with  them;  since  I  could 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER      5 

almost  always  enter,  to  the  gain  of  "horizon" 
but  too  often  to  the  perversion  of  experience, 
into  any  view  of  my  real  interests,  so-called,  that 
was  presented  to  me  with  a  dazzling  assurance. 
I  didn't  consider  certainly  that  I  was  so  forming 
my  mind,  and  was  doubtless  curious  to  see 
whether  it  mightn't,  by  a  process  flourishing  in 
other  applications,  get  to  some  extent  formed. 
It  wasn't,  I  think,  till  I  felt  the  rapture  of  that 
method's  arrest  that  I  knew  how  grotesquely 
little  it  had  done  for  me.  And  yet  I  bore  it 
afterwards  no  malice  —  resorting  again  to  that 
early  fatalistic  philosophy  of  which  the  general 
sense  was  that  almost  anything,  however  dis 
agreeable,  Had  been  worth  while;  so  unable  was 
I  to  claim  that  it  hadn't  involved  impressions. 
I  positively  felt  the  impressional  harvest  rather 
rich,  little  as  any  item  of  it  might  have  passed 
at  the  time  for  the  sort  of  thing  one  exhibits  as 
a  trophy  of  learning.  My  small  exhibition  was 
all  for  myself  and  consisted  on  the  whole  but  of 
a  dusty,  spotty,  ugly  picture  —  I  took  it  for  ugly 
well-nigh  to  the  pitch  of  the  sinister.  Its  being 
a  picture  at  all  —  and  I  clung  to  that  —  came  from 
the  personal  and  material  facts  of  the  place, 
where  I  was  the  only  scholar  of  English  speech, 
since  my  companions,  with  a  Genevese  pre 
dominance,  were  variously  polyglot.  They  won 
dered,  I  couldn't  doubt,  what  I  was  doing 


6      NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

among  them,  and  what  lost  lamb,  almost  audibly 
bleating,  I  had  been  charged  to  figure.  Yet  I 
remember  no  crude  chaff,  no  very  free  relation 
of  any  one  with  any  one,  no  high  pitch,  still  less 
any  low  descent,  of  young  pleasantry  or  irony; 
our  manners  must  have  been  remarkably  formed, 
and  our  general  tone  was  that  of  a  man-of-the- 
world  discretion,  or  at  the  worst  of  a  certain 
small  bourgeois  circumspection.  The  dread  in 
the  Genevese  of  having  definitely  to  "know" 
strangers  and  thereby  be  at  costs  for  any  sort 
of  hospitality  to  them  comes  back  to  me  as 
written  clear;  not  less  than  their  being  of  two 
sorts  or  societies,  sons  of  the  townspeople  pure 
and  simple  and  sons  of  the  local  aristocracy 
perched  in  certain  of  the  fine  old  houses  of  the 
Cite  and  enjoying  a  background  of  sturdily- 
seated  lakeside  villas  and  deeply  umbrageous 
campagnes.  I  remember  thinking  the  difference 
of  type,  complexion  and  general  allure  between 
these  groups  more  marked,  to  all  the  senses, 
than  any  "social  distinction"  I  had  yet  en 
countered.  But  the  great  thing  was  that  I 
could  so  simplify  our  enclosing  scene  itself,  round 
it  in  and  make  it  compose  —  the  dark,  the  dreary 
Institution,  squeezed  into  a  tall,  dim,  stony -faced 
and  stony-hearted  house  at  the  very  top  of  the 
Cite  and  directly  in  the  rear  of  the  Cathedral, 
portions  of  the  apse  of  which  seem  to  me  to  have 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER      7 

straggled  above  or  protruded  toward  it,  with 
other  odd  extraneous  masses  than  itself  pressing 
still  nearer.  This  simplification,  quite  luxuri 
ously  for  my  young  mind,  was  to  mere  mean 
blackness  of  an  old-world  sordid  order.  I  recog 
nised  rich  blackness  in  other  connections,  but 
this  was  somehow  of  a  harsh  tradition  and  a 
tragic  economy;  sordid  and  strong  w^as  what  I 
had  from  the  first  felt  the  place,  though  urging 
myself  always  to  rub  off  history  from  its  stones, 
and  suffering  thus,  after  a  fashion,  by  the  fact 
that  with  history  it  ought  to  be  interesting  and 
that  I  ought  to  know  just  how  and  why  it  was. 
For  that,  I  think,  was  ever  both  the  burden  and 
the  joy --the  complication,  I  mean,  of  interest, 
and  the  sense,  in  the  midst  of  the  ugly  and  the 
melancholy,  that  queer  crooked  silent  corners 
behind  cathedrals  wrought  in  their  way  for  one, 
did  something,  while  one  haunted  them,  to  the 
imagination  and  the  taste;  and  that  so,  once 
more,  since  the  generalisation  had  become  a  habit 
with  me,  I  couldn't,  seeing  and  feeling  these 
things,  really  believe  I  had  picked  up  nothing. 

When  I  sat  in  a  dusky  upper  chamber  and  read 
"French  literature"  with  blighted  M.  Toeppfer, 
son  of  a  happier  sire,  as  I  was  sure  the  charming 
writer  and  caricaturist,  in  spite  of  cumbrous  cares, 
must  have  been;  or  when,  a  couple  of  times  a 
week  and  in  the  same  eternal  twilight  (we  groped 


8      NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

almost  lampless  through  the  winter  days,  and  our 
glimmering  tapers,  when  they  sparsely  appeared, 
smelt  of  a  past  age),  I  worried  out  Virgil  and- 
Tite-Live  with  M.  Verchere,  or  Schiller  and 
Lessing  with  the  ruddy  noisy  little  professor  of 
German,  who  sat  always,  the  lesson  long,  in  a 
light  brown  talma,  the  sides  of  which  he  caused 
violently  to  flap  for  emphasis  like  agitated  wings, 
I  was  almost  conscious  of  the  breath  of  culture 
as  I  modestly  aspired  to  culture,  and  was  at  any 
rate  safe  for  the  time  from  a  summons  to  the 
blackboard  at  the  hands  of  awful  little  M.  Galopin, 
that  dispenser  of  the  paralysing  chalk  who  most 
affected  me.  Extremely  diminutive  and  wearing 
for  the  most  part  a  thin  inscrutable  smile,  the 
ghost  of  a  tribute  to  awkwardness  happily  carried 
off,  he  found  in  our  barren  interviews,  I  believed, 
a  charm  to  curiosity,  bending  afresh  each  time 
as  over  the  handful  of  specimen  dust,  unpre 
cedented  product  at  its  finest,  extracted  from 
the  scratched  soil  of  my  intelligence.  With  M. 
Toeppfer  I  was  almost  happy;  with  each  of  these 
instructors  my  hour  was  unshared,  my  exploits 
unwitnessed,  by  others;  but  M.  Toeppfer  became 
a  friend,  shewed  himself  a  causeur,  brightened  our 
lesson  with  memories  of  his  time  in  Paris,  where, 
if  I  am  not  mistaken,  he  had  made,  with  great 
animation,  his  baccalaureat,  and  whence  it  was 
my  possibly  presumptuous  impression  he  had 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER      9 

brought  back  a  state  of  health,  apparently  much 
impaired,  which  represented  contrition  for  youth 
ful  spirits.  He  had  haunted  the  parterre  of  the 
Theatre  Frangais,  and  when  we  read  Racine  his 
vision  of  Rachel,  whom  he  had  seen  there  as  often 
as  possible,  revived;  he  was  able  to  say  at 
moments  how  she  had  spoken  and  moved,  and  I 
recall  in  particular  his  telling  me  that  on  her 
entrance  as  Phedre,  borne  down,  in  her  languorous 
passion,  by  the  weight  of  her  royal  robes  —  "Que 
ces  vains  ornemens,  que  ces  voiles  me  pesent!" 
-  the  long  lapse  of  time  before  she  spoke  and 
while  she  sank  upon  a  seat  filled  itself  extraordi 
narily  with  her  visible  woe.  But  where  he  most 
gave  me  comfort  was  in  bringing  home  to  me 
that  the  house  commemorated,  immortalised,  as 
we  call  it,  in  the  first  of  his  father's  Nouvelles 
Genevoises,  La  Bibliotheque  de  mon  Oncle,  was 
none  other  than  the  structure  facing  us  where 
we  sat  and  which  so  impinged  and  leaned  on  the 
cathedral  walls  that  he  had  but  to  indicate  to  me 
certain  points  from  the  window  of  our  room  to 
reconstitute  thrillingly  the  scenery,  the  drollery, 
the  whimsical  action  of  the  tale.  There  was  a 
demonstration  I  could  feel  important,  votary 
and  victim  of  the  "scene,"  the  scene  and  the 
"atmosphere"  only,  that  I  had  been  formed  to 
be.  That  I  called  interesting  lore  —  called  it  so 
at  least  to  myself,  though  feeling  it  at  the  same 


10    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

time  of  course  so  little  directly  producible  that  I 
could  perhaps  even  then  have  fronted  this  actually 
remote  circumstance  of  my  never  having  produced 
it  till  this  moment.  There  abode  in  me,  I  may 
add,  a  sense  that  on  any  subject  that  did  appeal 
and  that  so  found  me  ready  —  such  subjects  being 
indeed  as  yet  vague,  but  immensely  suggestive 
of  number  —  I  should  have  grasped  the  confident 
chalk,  welcomed  the  very  biggest  piece,  not  in  the 
least  have  feared  the  blackboard.  They  were  in 
scribed,  alas  for  me,  in  no  recognised  course.  I 
put  my  hand  straight  on  another  of  them,  none 
the  less,  if  not  on  a  whole  group  of  others,  in  my 
ascent,  each  morning  of  the  spring  or  the  early 
summer  semestre,  of  the  admirable  old  Rue  de  la 
Tour  de  Boel,  pronounced  Boisl,  which,  dusky, 
steep  and  tortuous,  formed  a  short  cut  to  that 
part  of  the  Grand'  Rue  in  which  the  Academy  was 
then  seated. 

It  was  a  foul  and  malodorous  way  -  - 1  sniff 
again,  during  the  tepid  weeks,  its  warm  close  air 
and  that  near  presence  of  rank  cheese  which  was 
in  those  days  almost  everywhere,  for  the  nostril, 
the  note  of  urban  Switzerland;  these  things 
blessed  me  as  I  passed,  for  I  passed  straight  to 
freedom  and  away  from  M.  Galopin;  they  mixed 
with  the  benediction  of  the  exquisite  spring  and 
the  rapture,  constantly  renewed,  though  for  too 
short  a  period,  of  my  now  substituting  literary, 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    11 

or  in  other  words  romantic,  studies  for  the  pur 
suits  of  the  Institution  Rochette.  I  viewed  them 
as  literary,  these  new  branches  of  research,  though 
in  truth  they  were  loose  enough  and  followed  on 
loose  terms.  My  dear  parents,  as  if  to  make  up 
to  me,  characteristically,  for  my  recent  absurd 
strain  to  no  purpose,  allowed  me  now  the  happiest 
freedom,  left  me  to  attend  such  lectures  as  I 
preferred,  only  desiring  that  I  should  attend 
several  a  week,  and  content  —  cherished  memory 
that  it  makes  of  their  forms  with  me  —  that  these 
should  involve  neither  examinations  nor  reports. 
The  Academic  authorities,  good-natured  in  the 
extreme  and  accustomed  to  the  alien  amateur, 
appear  to  have  been  equally  content,  and  I  was 
but  too  delighted,  on  such  lines,  to  attend  any 
thing  or  everything.  My  whole  impression  now, 
with  my  self-respect  re-established,  was  of  some 
thing  exquisite:  I  was  put  to  the  proof  about 
nothing;  I  deeply  enjoyed  the  confidence  shown 
in  my  taste,  not  to  say  in  my  honour,  and  I  sat  out 
lecture  after  lecture  as  I  might  have  sat  out 
drama,  alternate  tragedy  and  comedy,  beautifully 
performed  —  the  professor  in  each  case  figuring 
the  hero,  and  the  undergraduates,  much  more 
numerous,  though  not  in  general  maturer  than 
those  of  the  Institution,  where  I  had  been,  to  my 
perception,  every  one's  junior,  partaking  in  an 
odd  fashion  of  the  nature  at  once  of  troupe  and 


12    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

spectators.  The  scientific  subjects,  in  a  large 
suggestive  way,  figured  tragedy,  I  seemed  to  feel, 
and  I  pushed  this  form  to  the  point  of  my  follow 
ing,  for  conscience'  sake,  though  not  with  the  last 
regularity,  lurid  demonstrations,  as  they  affected 
me,  on  anatomy  and  physiology;  these  in  turn 
leading  to  my  earnest  view,  at  the  Medical  School, 
of  the  dissection  of  a  magnifique  gendarme  —  which 
ordeal  brought  me  to  a  stand.  It  was  by  the 
literary  and  even  by  the  philosophic  leqons  that 
the  office  of  bright  comedy  was  discharged,  on 
the  same  liberal  lines;  at  the  same  time  that  I 
blush  to  remember  with  how  base  a  blankness 
I  must  have  several  times  listened  to  H.  F.  Amiel, 
admirable  writer,  analyst,  moralist.  His  name 
and  the  fact  of  his  having  been  then  a  mild  grave 
oracle  of  the  shrine  are  all  that  remain  with  me 
(I  was  fit  to  be  coupled  with  my  cousin  Anne 
King,  named  in  another  place,  who,  on  the  same 
Genevese  scene,  had  had  early  lessons  from  the 
young  Victor  Cherbuliez,  then  with  all  his  music 
in  him,  and  was  to  live  to  mention  to  me  that  he 
had  been  for  her  "like  any  one  else");  the  shrine, 
not  to  say  the  temple  itself,  shining  for  me  truly, 
all  that  season,  with  a  mere  confounding  blur 
of  light.  Was  it  an  effect  of  my  intensity  of  re 
action  from  what  I  had  hated?  was  it  to  a  great 
extent  the  beguiling  beauty  of  a  wonderful  Swiss 
spring,  into  which  all  things  else  soothingly 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     13 

melted,  becoming  together  a  harmony  without 
parts?  —  whatever  the  cause,  I  owed  it  to  some 
accident  only  to  be  described,  I  think,  as  happy, 
that  I  moved,  those  three  months,  in  an  acutely 
enjoying  and  yet,  as  would  at  present  appear, 
a  but  scantly  comparing  or  distinguishing  maze 
of  the  senses  and  the  fancy.  So  at  least,  to  cover 
this  so  thin  report  of  my  intelligence  and  my 
sum  of  acquisition  and  retention,  I  am  reduced 
to  supposing. 

What  essentially  most  operated,  I  make  out, 
however,  was  that  force  of  a  renewed  sense  of 
William's  major  activity  which  always  made  the 
presumption  of  any  degree  of  importance  or 
success  fall,  with  a  sort  of  ecstasy  of  resignation, 
from  my  own  so  minor.  Whatever  he  might 
happen  to  be  doing  made  him  so  interesting  about 
it,  and  indeed,  with  the  quickest  concomitance, 
about  everything  else,  that  what  I  probably  most 
did,  all  the  while,  was  but  to  pick  up,  and  to  the 
effect  not  a  bit  of  starving  but  quite  of  filling 
myself,  the  crumbs  of  his  feast  and  the  echoes  of 
his  life.  His  life,  all  this  Geneva  period,  had  been 
more  of  a  feast  than  mine,  and  I  recall  the  sense 
of  this  that  I  had  got  on  the  occasion  of  my 
accompanying  him,  by  his  invitation,  toward  the 
end  of  our  stay,  to  a  students'  celebration  or 
carouse,  which  was  held  at  such  a  distance  from 
the  town,  at  a  village  or  small  bourg,  up  in  the 


14     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

Vaud  back-country,  that  we  had,  after  a  consider 
able  journey  by  boat  and  in  heterogeneous  and 
primitive  conveyances,  tightly  packed,  to  spend 
two  nights  there.  The  Genevese  section  of  the 
Societe  de  Zoffingue,  the  great  Swiss  students' 
organisation  for  brotherhood  and  beer,  as  it 
might  summarily  be  defined,  of  which  my  brother 
had  become  a  member,  was  to  meet  there  certain 
other  sections,  now  vague  to  me,  but  predomi 
nantly  from  the  German-speaking  Cantons,  and, 
holding  a  Commerce,  to  toast  their  reunion  in 
brimming  bowls.  It  had  been  thought  the  im 
pression  might  amuse,  might  even  interest  me  - 
for  it  was  not  denied  that  there  were  directions, 
after  all,  in  which  I  could  perhaps  take  notice; 
and  this  was  doubtless  what  after  a  fashion 
happened,  though  I  felt  out  in  the  cold  (and  all 
the  more  that  the  cold  at  the  moment  happened 
to  be  cruel),  as  the  only  participant  in  view  not 
crowned  with  the  charming  white  cap  of  the 
society,  becoming  to  most  young  heads,  and  still 
less  girt  with  the  parti-coloured  ribbon  or  com 
plementary  scarf,  which  set  off  even  the  shabby  - 
for  shabbiness  considerably  figured.  I  partici 
pated  vaguely  but  not  too  excludedly;  I  suffered 
from  cold,  from  hunger  and  from  scant  sleeping- 
space;  I  found  the  Bernese  and  the  Balois  strange 
representatives  of  the  joy  of  life,  some  of  them  the 
finest  gothic  grotesques  —  but  the  time  none  the 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     15 

less  very  long;  all  of  which,  however,  was  in  the 
day's  work  if  I  might  live,  by  the  imagination, 
in  William's  so  adaptive  skin.  To  see  that  he 
was  adaptive,  was  initiated,  and  to  what  a  happy 
and  fruitful  effect,  that,  I  recollect,  was  my 
measure  of  content;  which  was  filled  again  to 
overflowing,  as  I  have  hinted,  on  my  finding  him 
so  launched  at  the  Academy  after  our  stretch  of 
virtual  separation,  and  just  fancying,  with  a 
freedom  of  fancy,  even  if  with  a  great  reserve  of 
expression,  how  much  he  might  be  living  and 
learning,  enjoying  and  feeling,  amid  work  that 
was  the  right  work  for  him  and  comrades,  con 
secrated  comrades,  that  at  the  worst  weren't  the 
wrong.  What  was  not  indeed,  I  always  asked 
myself,  the  right  work  for  him,  or  the  right  thing 
of  any  kind,  that  he  took  up  or  looked  at  or  played 
with?  —  failing,  as  I  did  more  than  ever  at  the 
time  I  speak  of,  of  the  least  glimpse  of  his  being 
below  an  occasion.  Whatever  he  played  with 
or  worked  at  entered  at  once  into  his  intelli 
gence,  his  talk,  his  humour,  as  with  the  action  of 
colouring-matter  dropped  into  water  or  that  of 
the  turning-on  of  a  light  within  a  window. 
Occasions  waited  on  him,  had  always  done  so, 
to  my  view;  and  there  he  was,  that  springtime, 
on  a  level  with  them  all:  the  effect  of  which 
recognition  had  much,  had  more  than  aught  else, 
to  say  to  the  charming  silver  haze  just  then 


16    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

wrapped  about  everything  of  which  I  was  con 
scious.  He  had  formed  two  or  three  young 
friendships  that  were  to  continue  and  to  which 
even  the  correspondence  of  his  later  years  testifies ; 
with  which  it  may  have  had  something  to  do  that 
the  Swiss  jeunesse  of  the  day  was,  thanks  to  the 
political  temperature  then  prevailing,  in  a  highly 
inflamed  and  exalted  state,  and  particularly 
sensitive  to  foreign  sympathy,  however  platonic, 
with  the  national  fever.  It  was  the  hour  at 
which  the  French  Emperor  was  to  be  paid  by 
Victor  Emmanuel  the  price  of  the  liberation  of 
Lombardy;  the  cession  of  Nice  and  Savoie  were 
in  the  air  —  with  the  consequence,  in  the  Genevese 
breast,  of  the  new  immediate  neighbourhood  thus 
constituted  for  its  territory.  Small  Savoie  was 
to  be  replaced,  close  against  it,  by  enormous  and 
triumphant  France,  whose  power  to  absorb  great 
mouthfuls  was  being  so  strikingly  exhibited. 
Hence  came  much  hurrying  to  and  fro,  much 
springing  to  arms,  in  the  way  of  exercise,  and 
much  flocking  to  the  standard-  "demonstra 
tions,"  in  other  words,  of  the  liveliest;  one  of  which 
I  recall  as  a  huge  tented  banquet,  largely  of  the 
white  caps,  where  I  was  present  under  my  brother's 
wing,  and,  out  of  a  sea  of  agitated  and  vociferous 
young  heads,  sprang  passionate  protests  and  toasts 
and  vows  and  declaimed  verses,  a  storm  of  local 
patriotism,  though  a  flurry  happily  short-lived. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    17 

All  this  was  thrilling,  but  the  term  of  it,  by  our 
consecrated  custom,  already  in  view;  we  were 
transferred  at  a  bound,  for  the  rest  of  that 
summer  of  1860,  to  the  care,  respectively,  of  a 
pair  of  kindly  pedagogues  at  Bonn-am-Rhein ; 
as  to  which  rapid  phase  I  find  remembrance  again 
lively,  with  a  letter  or  two  of  William's  to  rein 
force  it.  Yet  I  first  pick  up  as  I  pass  several 
young  lines  from  Geneva,  and  would  fain  pick  up 
too  the  drawing  that  accompanied  them  —  this 
by  reason  of  the  interest  of  everything  of  the  sort, 
without  exception,  that  remains  to  us  from  his 
hand.  He  at  a  given  moment,  which  came  quite 
early,  as  completely  ceased  to  ply  his  pencil  as  he 
had  in  his  younger  time  earnestly  and  curiously 
exercised  it;  and  this  constitutes  exactly  the 
interest  of  his  case.  No  stroke  of  it  that  I  have 
recovered  but  illustrates  his  aptitude  for  drawing, 
his  possible  real  mastery  of  the  art  that  was  yet, 
in  the  light  of  other  interests,  so  utterly  to  drop 
from  him;  and  the  example  is  rare  of  being  so 
finely  capable  only  to  become  so  indifferent.  It 
was  thanks  to  his  later  indifference  that  he  made 
no  point  of  preserving  what  he  had  done  —  a 
neglect  that,  still  more  lucklessly,  communicated 
itself  to  his  circle;  so  that  we  also  let  things  go, 
let  them  again  and  again  stray  into  the  desert, 
and  that  what  might  be  reproducible  is  but  the 
handful  of  scraps  that  have  happened  not  to 


18    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

perish.  "Mother,"  he  writes  to  his  father  in 
absence,  "does  nothing  but  sit  and  cry  for  you. 
She  refuses  to  associate  with  us  and  has  one  side 
of  the  room  to  herself.  She  and  the  Aunt  are 
now  in  the  Aunt's  room.  Wilky  and  Bobby,  at 
home  for  the  day,  are  at  church.  It  is  a  hard 
grey  day.  H.  is  telling  a  story  to  Louis  Osborne, 
and  I  will  try  to  make  a  sketch  of  them.  There 
has  been  a  terrible  bise;  the  two  Cornhill 
Magazines  have  come;  Mrs.  Thomas  has  been 
too  sick  to  be  at  dinner,  and  we  have  seen  some 
thing  of  some  most  extraordinary  English  people." 
Mrs.  Thomas,  of  New  York,  was  a  handsome 
American  widow  with  handsome  children,  all 
from  the  Avenue  Gabriel  in  Paris,  and  with  the 
boys  enjoying  life,  among  many  little  com 
patriots,  at  the  admired  establishment  of  M. 
Haccius,  even  as  our  small  brothers  were  doing 
at  that  of  M.  Maquelin;  yet  with  their  destiny 
of  ultimate  Europeanisation,  of  finally  complete 
absorption  into  the  French  system,  already  rather 
written  for  them  —  as  a  like  history,  for  like  fore 
doomed  young  subjects,  was  in  those  years  be 
ginning  to  be  prefigured,  through  marriages  of 
daughters  and  other  such  beguilements,  almost 
wherever  one  looked.  The  extraordinary  English 
people  were  perhaps  an  amiable  family  of  whom 
I  retain  an  image  as  conversing  with  our  parents 
at  the  season  when  the  latter  were  in  their  prompt 


-~r 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     19 

flush  of  admiration  for  George  Eliot's  first  novel, 
Adam  Bede,  then  just  given  to  the  world  and  their 
copy  of  which  they  had  rejoicingly  lent  to  their 
fellow  Anglo-Saxons.  I  catch  again  the  echo  of 
their  consternation  on  receiving  it  back  with  the 
remark  that  all  attempt  at  an  interest  in  such 
people,  village  carpenters  and  Methodists,  had 
proved  vain  —  for  that  style  of  Anglo-Saxon; 
together  with  that  of  my  own  excited  wonder 
about  such  other  people,  those  of  the  style  in 
question,  those  somehow  prodigiously  presented 
by  so  rare  a  delicacy,  so  proud  a  taste,  and  made 
thus  to  irradiate  a  strange  historic  light.  It 
referred  them,  and  to  a  social  order,  making  life 
more  interesting  and  more  various;  even  while 
our  clear  democratic  air,  that  of  our  little  family 
circle,  quivered  as  with  the  monstrosity.  It 
might,  this  note  that  made  us,  in  the  parlance  of 
to-day,  sit  up,  fairly  have  opened  to  me  that  great 
and  up  to  then  unsuspected  door  of  the  world 
from  which  the  general  collection  of  monstrosities, 
its  existence  suddenly  brought  home  to  us,  would 
doubtless  stretch  grandly  away.  The  story  I 
told  Louis  Osborne  has  quite  passed  from  me, 
but  not  little  Louis  himself,  an  American  child 
of  the  most  charming  and  appealing  intelligence, 
marked  by  some  malady  that  was  more  or  less 
permanently  to  cripple,  or  was  even  cruelly  to 
destroy  him,  and  whom  it  was  a  constant  joy  to 
aspire  to  amuse.  His  mother  was  schooling  her 


20    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

elder  son  in  the  company  of  our  own  brothers,  his 
father  having  established  them  all  at  Geneva 
that  he  might  go  for  a  tour  in  the  East.  Vivid 
to  me  still  is  the  glimpse  I  happened  to  get  one 
Sunday  betimes  of  the  good  Maquelin  couple, 
husband  and  wife,  in  deep  mourning  —  a  touch 
of  the  highest  decency --who  had  come,  with 
faces  a  yard  long,  to  announce  to  Mrs.  Osborne 
the  death  of  her  husband  in  the  Holy  Land, 
communicated  to  them,  by  slow  letter,  in  the 
first  instance.  With  little  Louis  on  one's  knee 
one  didn't  at  all  envy  M.  and  Madame  Maquelin; 
and  than  this  small  faint  phantom  of  sociable 
helpless  little  listening  Louis  none  more  exquisite 
hovers  before  me. 

With  which  mild  memories  thus  stands  out  for 
me  too  the  lively  importance,  that  winter,  of  the 
arrival,  from  the  first  number,  of  the  orange- 
covered  earlier  Cornhill  —  the  thrill  of  each  com 
posing  item  of  that  first  number  especially 
recoverable  in  its  intensity.  Is  anything  like 
that  thrill  possible  to-day  —  for  a  submerged  and 
blinded  and  deafened  generation,  a  generation 
so  smothered  in  quantity  and  number  that 
discrimination,  under  the  gasp,  has  neither  air 
to  breathe  nor  room  to  turn  round?  Has  any 
like  circumstance  now  conceivably  the  value,  to 
the  charmed  attention,  so  far  as  anything  worth 
naming  attention,  or  any  charm  for  it,  is  any 
where  left,  of  the  fact  that  Trollope's  Framley 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    21 

Parsonage  there  began?  —  let  alone  the  still  other 
fact  that  the  Roundabout  Papers  did  and  that 
Thackeray  thus  appeared  to  us  to  guarantee 
personally,  intimately,  with  a  present  audibility 
that  was  as  the  accent  of  good  company,  the  new 
relation  with  him  and  with  others  of  company  not 
much  worse,  as  they  then  seemed,  that  such  a 
medium  could  establish.  To  speak  of  these  things, 
in  truth,  however,  is  to  feel  the  advantage  of 
being  able  to  live  back  into  the  time  of  the  more 
sovereign  periodical  appearances  much  of  a  com 
pensation  for  any  reduced  prospect  of  living 
forward.  For  these  appearances,  these  strong 
time-marks  in  such  stretches  of  production  as  that  ,, 
of  Dickens,  that  of  Thackeray,  that  of  George 
Eliot,  had  in  the  first  place  simply  a  genial  weight 
and  force,  a  direct  importance,  and  in  the  second 
a  command  of  the  permeable  air  and  the  collective 
sensibility,  with  which  nothing  since  has  begun 
to  deserve  comparison.  They  were  enrichments 
of  life,  they  were  large  arrivals,  these  particular 
renewals  of  supply  -  -  to  which,  frankly,  I  am 
moved  to  add,  the  early  Cornhill  giving  me  a 
pretext,  even  the  frequent  examples  of  Anthony 
Trollope's  fine  middle  period,  looked  at  in  the 
light  of  old  affection  and  that  of  his  great  heavy 
shovelfuls  of  testimony  to  constituted  English 
matters;  a  testimony  of  course  looser  and 
thinner  than  Balzac's  to  his  range  of  facts, 
but  charged  with  something  of  the  big  Balzac 


22    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

authority.  These  various,  let  alone  numerous, 
deeper-toned  strokes  of  the  great  Victorian  clock 
were  so  many  steps  in  the  march  of  our  age, 
besides  being  so  many  notes,  full  and  far-rever 
berating,  of  our  having  high  company  to  keep  - 
high,  I  mean,  to  cover  all  the  ground,  in  the  sense 
of  the  genial  pitch  of  it.  So  it  was,  I  remember 
too,  that  our  parents  spoke  of  their  memory  of 
the  successive  surpassing  attestations  of  the 
contemporary  presence  of  Scott;  to  which  we 
might  have  replied,  and  doubtless  after  no  great 
space  began  to  reply,  that  our  state,  and  even 
their  later  one,  allowing  for  a  certain  gap,  had 
nothing  to  envy  any  other.  I  witnessed,  for  that 
matter,  with  all  my  senses,  young  as  I  was,  the 
never-to-be-equalled  degree  of  difference  made, 
for  what  may  really  be  called  the  world-con 
sciousness  happily  exposed  to  it,  by  the  prolonged 
"coming-out"  of  The  Newcomes,  yellow  number 
by  number,  and  could  take  the  general  civilised 
participation  in  the  process  for  a  sort  of  basking 
in  the  light  of  distinction.  The  process  repeated 
itself  for  some  years  under  other  forms  and 
stimuli,  but  the  merciless  change  was  to  come  - 
so  that  through  whatever  bristling  mazes  we  may 
now  pick  our  way  it  is  not  to  find  them  open  into 
any  such  vales  of  Arcady.  My  claim  for  our  old 
privilege  is  that  we  did  then,  with  our  pace  of 
dignity,  proceed  from  vale  to  vale. 


II 

IV  y^Y  point  at  any  rate,  such  as  it  is,  would 
I  %/  I  be  that  even  at  the  age  I  had  reached  in 
1860  something  of  the  happier  time  still 
lingered  -  -  the  time  in  which  a  given  product  of 
the  press  might  have  a  situation  and  an  aspect,  a 
considerability,  so  to  speak,  a  circumscription  and 
an  aura;  room  to  breathe  and  to  show  in,  margin 
for  the  casting  of  its  nets.  The  occasion  at  large 
was  doubtless  shrinking,  one  could  note  —  shrink 
ing  like  the  unlet  "house"  on  a  night  of  grandest 
opera,  but  "standing  room  only"  was  not  yet 
everywhere  the  sign,  and  the  fine  deliberate  thing 
could  here  and  there  find  its  seat.  I  really  indeed 
might  have  held  it  the  golden  age  of  letters  still, 
and  of  their  fond  sister  leisure,  with  that  quiet 
swim  into  our  ken  on  its  appointed  day,  during  our 
Bonn  summer,  of  the  charming  Once  a  Week  of 
the  prime,  the  prime  of  George  Meredith  and 
Charles  Reade  and  J.  E.  Millais  and  George  du 
Maurier;  which  our  father,  to  bridge  our  separation 
from  him,  sent  us,  from  Paris  and  elsewhere,  in 
prompt  and  characteristic  relief  of  our  plotted, 
our  determined  strict  servitude  to  German,  and  to 

the  embrace  of  the  sweet  slim  essence  of  which  the 

23 


24    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

strain  of  one's  muscles  round  a  circular  ton  of 
advertisement  was  not  a  condition  attached.  I 
should  like  to  say  that  I  rioted,  all  that  season, 
on  the  supreme  German  classics  and  on  Evan 
Harrington,  with  Charles  Reade's  A  Good  Fight, 
the  assured  little  prelude  to  The  Cloister  and 
the  Hearth,  thrown  in;  and  I  should  indeed  be 
ready  to  say  it,  were  not  the  expression  gross  for 
the  really  hushed  piety  of  my  attitude  during 
those  weeks.  It  was  perhaps  not  quite  till  then 
that  I  fully  emerged  from  the  black  shadow  of  the 
Ecole  Preparatoire  aux  Ecoles  Speciales,  not 
quite  till  we  had  got  off  beyond  the  blest  Rhine 
at  Basle  that  I  ceased  to  hear  and  feel  all  but  just 
behind  me,  portentous  perhaps  of  another  spring, 
the  cold  breath  of  the  monster.  The  guttery 
Bonn-Gasse  was  during  those  weeks  of  the  year 
close  and  stale,  and  the  house  of  our  good  Herr 
Doctor  Humpert,  professor  at  the  Bonn  Gym 
nasium,  in  which  I  shared  a  room  with  my  brother 
Wilky,  contracted  and  dim,  as  well  as  fragrant 
through  a  range  of  assaults  that  differed  only  in 
kind  and  not  at  all  in  number  from  those  of  the 
street  itself;  and  yet  I  held  the  period  and  the 
whole  situation  idyllic  —  the  slightly  odd  sense 
of  which  was  one's  being  to  that  extent  attuned 
to  the  life  of  letters  and  of  (oh  the  great  thing!) 
impressions  "gone  in  for."  YFo  feel  a  unity,  a 
character  and  a  tone  in  one's  Tmpressions,  to  feel 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    25 

them  related  and  all  harmoniously  coloured,  that 
was  positively  to  face  the  aesthetic,  the  creative, 
even,  quite  wondrously,  the  critical  life  and 
almost  on  the  spot  to  commence  author.  They 
had  begun,  the  impressions  -  -  that  was  what  was 
the  matter  with  them  —  to  scratch  quite  audibly 
at  the  door  of  liberation,  of  extension,  of  pro 
jection;  what  they  were  of  one  more  or  less 
knew,  but  what  they  were  for  was  the  question 
that  began  to  stir,  though  one  was  still  to  be  a 
long  time  at  a  loss  directly  to  answer  jLtJ 

There,  for  the  present,  was  the  rub,  the  dark 
difficulty  at  which  one  could  but  secretly  stare  - 
secretly  because  one  was  somehow  ashamed  of 
its  being  there  and  would  have  quickly  removed 
one's  eyes,  or  tried  to  clear  them,  if  caught  in  the 
act  of  watching.  \  Impressions  were  not  merejy 
all  right  but  were  the  dearest  things  in  the  world  ;i 
only  one  would  have  gone  to  the  stake  ratEer 
than  in  the  first  place  confessed  to  some  of  them, 
or  in  the  second  announced  that  one  really  lived 
by  them  and  built  on  them.  This  failure  then 
to  take  one's  stand  in  the  connection  could  but 
come  from  the  troubled  view  that  they  were 
naught  without  a  backing,  a  stout  stiff  hard- 
grained  underside  that  would  hold  them  together 
and  of  which  the  terrible  name  was  simply  science, 
otherwise  learning,  and  learning  exclusively  by 
books,  which  were  at  once  the  most  beautiful  and 


26    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

the  most  dreadful  things  in  the  world,  some  of 
them  right,  strikingly,  showily  right,  some  of 
them  disgracefully  and  almost  unmentionably 
wrong,  that  is  grossly  irrelevant,  as  for  instance 
a  bound  volume  of  Once  a  Week  would  be,  but 
remarkable  above  all  for  overwhelming  number 
and  in  general  for  defiance  of  comprehension.  It 
was  true  that  one  had  from  time  to  time  the  rare 
adventure  of  one's  surprise  at  understanding 
parts  of  them  none  the  less  —  understanding  more 
than  a  very  little,  more  than  much  too  little;  but 
there  was  no  practical  support  to  speak  of  in  that, 
even  the  most  one  could  ever  hope  to  understand 
being  a  mere  drop  in  the  bucket.  Never  did  I 
quite  strike  it  off,  I  think,  that  impressions  might 
themselves  be  science  —  and  this  probably  because 
I  didn't  then  know  them,  when  it  came  to  the 
point,  as  anything  but  life.  I  knew  them  but 
by  that  collective  and  unpractical  —  many  persons 
would  have  said  that  frivolous  —  name;  which 
saw  me  little  further.  I  was  under  the  impression 
-  this  in  fact  the  very  liveliest  of  what  might  have 
been  called  the  lot  —  that  life  and  knowledge  were 
simply  mutual  opposites,  one  inconsistent  with 
the  other;  though  hovered  about,  together,  at 
the  same  time,  by  the  anomaly  that  when  knowl 
edge  impinged  upon  life,  pushed  against  her,  as  it 
were,  and  drove  her  to  the  wall,  it  was  all  right, 
and  such  was  knowledge's  way  and  title;  whereas 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    27 

when  life  played  the  like  tricks  with  knowledge 
nothing  but  shame  for  the  ruder,  even  if  lighter, 
party  could  accrue.  There  was  to  come  to  me 
of  course  in  time  the  due  perception  that  neither 
was  of  the  least  use  —  use  to  myself  —  without  the 
other;  but  meanwhile,  and  even  for  much  after, 
the  extreme  embarrassment  continued:  to  which 
ever  of  the  opposites  one  gave  one's  self  it  was 
with  a  sense  of  all  but  basely  sacrificing  the  other. 
However,  the  conflict  and  the  drama  involved 
in  the  question  at  large  was  doubtless  what 
was  to  make  consciousness  —  under  whichever  of 
the  two  names  one  preferred  to  entertain  it  — 
supremely  intense  and  interesting. 

This  then  is  by  way  of  saying  that  the  idyll, 
as  I  have  called  it,  of  the  happy  juncture  I 
glanced  at  a  moment  back  came  from  the  fact 
that  I  didn't  at  all  know  how  much  I  was  living, 
and  meanwhile  quite  supposed  I  was  considera 
bly  learning.  When,  rising  at  some  extraor 
dinary  hour  of  the  morning,  I  went  forth  through 
the  unawakened  town  (and  the  Germans,  at 
that  time,  heaven  knows,  were  early  afoot  too), 
and  made  for  the  open  country  and  the  hill,  in 
particular,  of  the  neighbouring  Venusberg,  long, 
low  and  bosky,  where  the  dews  were  still  fresh 
and  ancient  mummies  of  an  old  cloister,  as  I 
remember  it,  somewhere  perched  and  exposed, 
I  was  doing,  to  my  sense,  an  attuned  thing; 


28    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

attuned,  that  is,  to  my  coming  home  to  bend 
double  over  Schiller's  Thirty  Years'  War  in  the 
strenuous  spirit  that  would  keep  me  at  it,  or 
that  would  vary  it  with  Goethe's  Wahlverwandt- 
schaften,  till  late  in  the  warm  afternoon.  I  found 
German  prose  much  tougher  than  the  verse,  and 
thereby  more  opposed  to  "life,"  as  to  which  I 
of  course  couldn't  really  shake  off  the  sense  that 
it  might  be  worked  as  infinitely  comprehensive, 
comprehensive  even  of  the  finest  discriminations 
against  it.  The  felicity,  present  but  naturally 
unanalysed,  was  that  the  whole  thing,  our  current 
episode,  was  exactly  comprehensive  of  life,  pre 
senting  it  in  particular  as  characteristically 
German,  and  therein  freshly  vivid  —  with  the 
great  vividness  that,  by  our  parents'  vague  wish, 
we  were  all  three  after  or  out  for;  in  spite  of 
our  comparatively  restricted  use,  in  those  days, 
of  these  verbal  graces.  Such  therefore  was  the 
bright  unity  of  our  experience,  or  at  least  of  my 
own  share  in  it  —  this  luck  that,  through  the 
intensity  of  my  wanting  it  to,  all  consciousness, 
all  my  own  immediate,  tasted  German,  to  the 
great  and  delightful  quickening  of  my  imagina 
tion.  The  quickening  was  of  course  no  such 
matter  as  I  was  to  know  nearly  ten  years  later 
on  plunging  for  the  first  time  over  the  Alps  into 
Italy;  but,  letting  alone  that  I  was  then  so  much 
older,  I  had  wondered  about  Italy,  to  put  it 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    29 

embracingly,  far  more  than  I  was  constitutionally 
capable  of  wondering  about  Germany.  It  was 
enough  for  me  at  Bonn  that  I  felt  no  lack  of 
appetite  —  had  for  the  time  all  the  illusion  of 
being  on  the  way  to  something;  to  something, 
I  mean,  with  which  the  taste  of  German  might 
somehow  directly  mix  itself.  Every  aspect  and 
object  round  about  was  a  part,  at  all  events,  of 
the  actual  mixture;  and  when  on  drowsy  after 
noons,  not  a  little  interspaced  indeed,  I  attempted 
the  articulate  perusal  of  Hermann  und  Dorothea 
with  our  good  Professor,  it  was  like  dreaming, 
to  the  hum  of  bees,  if  not  to  the  aftertaste  of 
"good  old  Rhenish,"  in  some  homely  fruity 
eighteenth-century  garden. 

The  good  old  Rhenish  is  no  such  false  note  in 
this  reconstitution ;  I  seem  to  see  the  Frau 
Doctorin  and  her  ancient  mildly-scowling  sister 
Fraulein  Stamm,  who  reminded  me  of  Hepzibah 
Pyncheon  in  The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables, 
perpetually  wiping  green  hock-glasses  and  holding 
them  up  to  our  meagre  light,  as  well  as  setting 
out  long-necked  bottles,  with  rather  chalky  cakes, 
in  that  forward  section  of  our  general  eating-and- 
living-room  which  formed  our  precinct  of  re 
ception  and  conversation.  The  unbroken  space 
was  lighted  at  either  end,  from  street  and  court, 
and  its  various  effects  of  tempered  shade  or, 
frankly  speaking,  of  rather  greasy  gloom,  amid 


30    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

which  the  light  touch  of  elegance  gleamed  but  from 
the  polish  of  the  glasses  and  the  sloping  shoulders 
of  their  bottle,  comes  back  to  me  as  the  view 
of  an  intensely  internal  interior.  I  recall  how 
oppressively  in  that  apartment,  how  congestedly, 
as  in  some  cage  of  which  the  wires  had  been 
papered  over,  I  felt  housed  and  disconnected; 
I  scarce  then,  I  think,  knew  what  the  matter  was, 
but  it  could  only  have  been  that  in  all  those 
summer  weeks,  to  the  best  of  my  belief,  no  window 
was  eVer  once  opened.  Still,  there  was  the  scene, 
the  thick,  the  much-mixed  chiaroscuro  through 
which  the  two  ladies  of  the  family  emerged  from 
an  exiguous  retreat  just  off  the  back  end  of  the 
place  with  ample  platters  of  food;  the  almost 
impenetrable  dusk  of  the  middle  zone,  where  the 
four  or  five  of  us,  seated  with  our  nutcracker- 
faced  pastor,  conveyed  the  food  to  our  mouths 
with  a  confidence  mainly  borrowed  from  the  play 
of  his  own  deep-plunging  knife;  and  then  the 
forward,  the  festal  extension,  the  privilege  of 
occasionally  lingering  in  which,  or  of  returning 
to  it  for  renewed  refreshment,  was  a  recognition 
both  of  our  general  minding  of  our  business  up 
stairs — left  as  we  were  to  thumb  our  Plagel's 
Dictionary  by  the  hour  so  long  as  we  invoked 
no  other  oracle.  Our  drowsy  Doctor  invited  no 
such  approach;  he  smiled  upon  us  as  if  unseen 
forefingers  of  great  force  had  been  inserted  for 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    31 

the  widening  of  his  mouth  at  the  corners,  and  I 
had  the  sense  of  his  not  quite  knowing  what  to 
make  of  our  being  so  very  gently  barbaric,  or 
rather  so  informally  civilised;  he  safely  housed 
and  quite  rankly  fed  us,  guided  us  to  country 
walks  and  to  the  swimming-baths  by  the  Rhine- 
side,  introduced  us  to  fruit-gardens  where,  on 
payment  of  the  scantest  tribute,  we  were  suffered 
to  consume  off-hand  bushels  of  cherries,  plums 
and  pears;  suffered  us  to  ascend  the  Drachenfels 
and  to  partake  of  coffee  at  Rolandseck  and  in 
other  friendly  open-air  situations;  but  flung  his 
gothic  shadow  as  little  as  possible  over  my  so 
passive  page  at  least,  and  took  our  rate  of 
acquisition  savingly  for  granted. 

This,  in  the  optimism  of  the  hour,  I  have  no 
memory  of  resenting;  the  page,  though  slow, 
managed  at  the  same  time  to  be  stirring,  and  I 
asked  no  more  of  any  one  or  anything  but  that 
they  should  be  with  all  due  gothicism  whatever 
they  most  easily  might.  The  long  vistas  of  the 
beeches  and  poplars  on  the  other  side  of  the  Rhine, 
after  we  had  crossed  by  the  funicular  ferry, 
gothically  rustled  and  murmured:  I  fancied  their 
saying  perpetually  "We  are  German  woods,  we 
are  German  woods  —  which  makes  us  very  wonder 
ful,  do  you  know?  and  unlike  any  others:  don't 
you  feel  the  spell  of  the  very  sound  of  us  and  of  the 
beautiful  words,  'Old  German  woods,  old  German 


32    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

woods/  even  if  you  can't  tell  why?"  I  couldn't 
altogether  tell  why,  but  took  everything  on  trust 
as  mystically  and  valuably  gothic  —  valuably 
because  ministering  with  peculiar  directness,  as  I 
gathered,  to  culture.  I  was  in,  or  again  I  was 
"out,"  in  my  small  way,  for  culture;  which 
seemed  quite  to  come,  come  from  everywhere  at 
once,  with  the  most  absurd  conciliatory  rush, 
pitifully  small  as  would  have  been  any  list  of  the 
sources  I  tapped.  The  beauty  was  in  truth  that 
everything  was  a  source,  giving  me,  by  the 
charmingest  breach  of  logic,  more  than  it  at  all 
appeared  to  hold;  which  was  exactly  what  had 
not  been  the  case  at  the  Institution  Rochette, 
where  things  had  appeared,  or  at  least  had 
pretended,  to  hold  so  much  more  than  they  gave. 
The  oddity  was  that  about  us  now  everything  — 
everything  but  the  murmur  of  the  German  woods 
and  the  great  flow  and  magic  name  of  the  Rhine 
—  was  more  ugly  than  beautiful,  tended  in  fact 
to  say  at  every  turn:  "You  shall  suffer,  yes, 
indeed  you  are  doing  so  (stick  up  for  your  right 
to!)  in  your  sense  of  form;  which  however  is 
quite  compatible  with  culture,  is  really  one  of  the 
finest  parts  of  it,  and  may  decidedly  prove  to  you 
that  you're  getting  it."  I  hadn't,  in  rubbing, 
with  whatever  weakness,  against  French  and,  so 
far  as  might  be,  against  France,  and  in  sinking, 
very  sensibly,  more  and  more  into  them,  particu- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    S3 

larly  felt  that  I  was  getting  it  as  such;  what  I 
was  getting  as  such  was  decidedly  rather  my 
famous  "life,"  and  without  so  much  as  thinking 
of  the  degree,  with  it  all,  of  the  valuable  and  the 
helpful. 

Life  meanwhile  I  had  a  good  deal  of  at  my 
side  in  the  person  of  my  brother  Wilky,  who,  as 
I  have  had  occasion  elsewhere  to  say,  contrived 
in  those  years  to  live,  or  to  have  every  appearance 
of  so  doing,  with  an  immediacy  that  left  me  far 
in  the  lurch.  I  was  always  still  wondering  how, 
while  he  had  solved  the  question  simply  ambu- 
lando,  which  was  for  him  but  by  the  merest  sociable 
stroll.  This  represented  to  me  success  —  success 
of  a  kind,  but  such  an  assured  kind  —  in  a  degree 
that  was  my  despair;  and  I  have  never  forgotten 
how,  that  summer,  when  the  Herr  Doctor  did 
look  in,  did  settle  down  a  little  to  have  the 
bristling  page  out  with  us,  Wilky's  share  of  the 
hour  took  on  the  spot  the  form  of  his  turning  at 
once  upon  our  visitor  the  tables  of  earnest  inquiry. 
He  delighted,  after  this  tribute  of  eagerness,  to 
meet  the  Doctor's  interrogative  advance;  but 
the  communication  so  made  was  of  anything  and 
everything  except  the  fruit  of  his  reading  (the 
act  of  reading  was  inhuman  and  repugnant  to 
him),  and  I  amazedly  noted  while  I  nursed  my 
small  hoard  that  anything  he  offered  did  in  the 
event  quite  as  well:  he  could  talk  with  such 


34    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

charm,  such  drollery  of  candour,  such  unex 
pectedness  of  figure,  about  what  he  had  done 
and  what  he  hadn't  —  or  talk  at  least  before 
it,  behind  it  and  beside  it.  We  had  three  or 
four  house-companions,  youths  from  other  places 
attending  the  Gymnasium  and  committed  to  our 
Professor's  care,  as  to  whom  I  could  somehow 
but  infer  that  they  were,  each  in  his  personal  way, 
inordinately  gothic  —  which  they  had  to  be  to 
supply  to  my  mind  a  relation,  or  a  substitute 
for  a  relation,  with  them;  whereas  my  younger 
brother,  without  a  scrap  of  a  view  of  them,  a 
grain  of  theory  or  formula,  tumbled  straight  into 
their  confidence  all  round.  Our  air  for  him  was 
by  just  so  much  life  as  it  couldn't  have  dreamed 
of  being  culture,  and  he  was  so  far  right  that  when 
the  son  of  the  house  and  its  only  child,  the  slim 
and  ardent  Theodor,  who  figured  to  me  but  as 
a  case  of  such  classic  sensibility,  of  the  Lieder  or 
the  Werther  sort,  as  might  have  made,  with  the 
toss  of  a  yellow  lock  or  the  gleam  of  a  green 
blouse,  the  image  for  an  Uhland  or  a  Heine 
stanza,  had  imparted  to  him  an  intention  of 
instant  suicide  under  some  resentment  of  parental 
misconception,  he  had  been  able  to  use  dissuasion, 
or  otherwise  the  instinct  of  then  most  freely 
fraternising,  with  a  success  to  which  my  relish  for 
so  romantic  a  stroke  as  charmingly  in  Theodor's 
character  and  setting  mightn't  at  all  have 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    35 

attained.  There  is  a  small  something  of  each  of 
us  in  a  passage  of  an  ingenuous  letter  addressed 
by  him  from  the  midst  of  these  conditions  to  his 
parents.  I  fondly  catch,  I  confess,  at  any  of  these 
recoverable  lights;  finding  them  at  the  best  too 
scant  for  my  commemorative  purpose. 

Willy  got  his  photograph  this  morning  after  three 
hours'  hard  work.  From  the  post-office  he  was  sent 
to  the  custom-house,  and  there  was  obliged  to  sign  his 
name  and  to  go  to  some  neighbouring  bookstore  to  buy 
a  seal.  On  returning  to  the  custom-house  he  was  sent 
back  to  the  post-office  to  get  some  document  or  other. 
After  obtaining  this  article  he  turned  his  steps  once 
more  to  the  custom-house,  where  an  insolent  officer 
told  him  he  must  wait  an  hour.  W.  informed  him 
that  he  would  return  at  the  end  of  the  hour,  and  ac 
cordingly  for  the  third  time  went  to  the  C.H.,  and 
was  conducted  by  the  clerk  to  a  cellar  where  the 
packages  were  kept,  and  there  told  to  take  off  his  hat. 
He  obeyed,  raging,  and  then  was  a  fourth  time  sent 
to  the  P.O.  —  this  time  to  pay  money.  Happily  he  is 
now  in  possession  of  his  property.  H.  and  he  took  a 
walk  this  afternoon  to  a  fruit-garden,  where  plums, 
cherries,  gooseberries  and  currants  were  abundant. 
After  half  an  hour's  good  work  H.  left  W.  finishing 
merely  the  plums  —  the  cherry  and  gooseberry  course 
to  come  later.  He  was  so  enchanted  that  he  thought 
H.  a  great  fool  to  leave  so  soon.  How  does  Paris 
now  strike  you?  It  can't  be  as  nice  as  Bonn.  You 
had  better  write  to  Bob. 

Bob,  our  youngest  brother,  had  been  left  at 
Geneva  with  excellent  M.  Maquelin  and  was  at 


36    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

that  time  en  course,  over  the  Alps,  with  this 
gentleman  and  their  young  companions;  a  most 
desirable,  delicious  excursion,  which  I  remember 
following  in  envious  fancy,  as  it  included  a  descent 
to  the  Italian  Lakes  and  a  push  on  as  far  as  Genoa. 
In  reference  to  which  excursion  I  cull  a  line  or 
two  from  a  faded  scrap  of  a  letter  addressed  a 
little  later  by  this  youngest  of  us  to  his  "Beloved 
Brother"  William.  "This  is  about  our  Grande 
Course.  We  started  at  5  o'clock  in  the  morning 
with  our  faces  and  hands  all  nicely  washed  and 
our  nails  clean.  The  morning  was  superb,  and 
as  we  waited  in  the  court  the  soft  balmy  air  of 
the  mountains  came  in  bringing  with  it  the 
melodious  sound  of  the  rappel  for  breakfast. 
This  finished  we  bade  adieu,  and  I  could  see  the 
emotions  of  the  kind  and  ever-watchful  Madame 
Maquelin  as  a  few  silent  drops  trickled  down  her 
fair  cheeks.  We  at  last  arrived  at  the  boat, 
where  we  met  Mr.  Peters,  a  portly  gentleman 
from  the  city  of  Philadelphia,  with  his  two  sweet 
sons,  one  twelve,  the  other  seven  years  old,  the 
eldest  coming  from  Mr.  E.'s  school  with  no  very 
good  opinion  of  the  principal  —  saying  he  had  seen 
him  in  a  state  of  tightness  several  times  during 
his  stay  there."  Mr.  Peters  appears  to  have  been 
something  of  a  pessimist,  for,  when  at  a  later 
stage  "it  began  to  rain  hard,  and  half  the  road 
was  a  foot  deep  in  water,  and  the  cocher  had 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    37 

stopped  somewhere  to  get  lanterns  and  had  at 
the  same  time  indulged  in  certain  potations  which 
didn't  make  him  drive  any  the  straighter,"  this 
gentleman  "insinuated  that  we  had  all  better 
have  been  with  our  mothers."  The  letter  records 
at  some  length  the  early  phases  of  the  affair,  but 
under  the  weight  of  the  vision  of  Italy  it  rather 
breaks  down  and  artlessly  simplifies.  "Genoa 
is  a  most  lively  town,  and  there  is  a  continual 
swarm  of  sailors  in  the  street.  We  visited  several 
palaces,  among  others  that  of  Victor  Emanuel, 
which  is  very  fine,  and  the  fruit  is  very  cheap. 
We  stayed  there  several  days,  but  at  last  started 
for  Turin,  where  we  spent  a  Sunday  —  a  place  I 
didn't  much  like,  I  suppose  because  of  that  reason. 
We  left  Turin  the  next  day  on  foot,  but  lost  our 
road  and  had  to  come  back."  I  recover  even  in 
presence  of  these  light  accents  my  shade  of  wonder 
at  this  odd  chance  that  made  the  least  developed 
of  us  the  subject  of  what  seemed  to  me  even  then 
a  privilege  of  the  highest  intensity;  and  there 
again  keeps  it  company  my  sense,  through  all  the 
after  years,  that  this  early  glimpse  of  the  blest 
old  Italy,  almost  too  early  though  it  appears  to 
have  but  just  missed  being,  might  have  done 
something  towards  preparing  or  enriching  for  Bob 
the  one  little  plot  of  consciousness  in  which  his 
deeply  troubled  life  was  to  find  rest.  He  was  in 
the  event  also  fondly  to  aim  at  painting,  like  two 


38    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

of  his  brothers;  but  whereas  they  were  to  fumble 
with  the  lock,  in  their  very  differing  degree,  only 
in  those  young  years,  he  was  to  keep  at  it  most 
as  he  grew  older,  though  always  with  a  perfect 
intelligence  of  the  inevitable  limits  of  the  relation, 
the  same  intelligence  that  was  so  sharp  and  sad, 
so  extraordinarily  free  and  fine  and  detached  in 
fact,  as  play  of  mind,  play  of  independent  talk 
and  of  pen,  for  the  limits  of  his  relation  to  many 
other  matters.  Singularly  intelligent  all  round, 
yet  with  faculties  that  had  early  declined  any 
consummation  of  acquaintance  with  such  training 
as  under  a  different  sort  of  pressure  he  might  have 
enjoyed,  he  had  an  admirable  hand  and  eye,  and 
I  have  known  no  other  such  capacity  for  absorb 
ing  or  storing  up  the  minutest  truths  and  shades 
of  landscape  fact  and  giving  them  out  afterward, 
in  separation  from  the  scene,  with  full  assurance 
and  felicity.  He  could  do  this  still  better  even 
than  he  cared  to  do;  I  for  my  part  cared  much 
more  that  he  should  than  he  ever  did  himself, 
and  then  it  was,  I  dare  say,  that  I  made  the 
reflection:  "He  took  in  the  picture  of  Italy, 
with  his  firm  hard  gift,  having  the  chance  while 
William  and  I  were  still,  comparatively,  small 
untouched  and  gaping  barbarians;  and  it  should 
always  be  in  him  to  do  at  some  odd  fine  moment 
a  certain  honour  to  that."  I  held  to  it  that  that 
sensibility  had  played  in  him  more  than  by  any 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    39 

outward  measure  at  the  time;  which  was  per 
haps  indeed  one  of  the  signs  within  me  of  the 
wasteful  habit  or  trick  of  a  greater  feeling  for 
people's  potential  propriety  or  felicity  or  full 
expression  than  they  seemed  able  to  have  them 
selves.  At  all  events  I  was  absolutely  never  to 
cease  to  remember  for  Bob,  through  everything  - 
and  there  was  much  and  of  the  most  agitated 
and  agitating  —  that  he  had  been  dipped  as  a  boy 
into  the  sacred  stream;  to  some  effect  which, 
thanks  to  two  or  three  of  his  most  saving  and  often 
so  amusing  sensibilities,  the  turbid  sea  of  his  life 
might  never  quite  wash  away. 

William  had  meanwhile  come  to  Bonn  with 
us,  but  was  domiciled  with  another  tutor,  younger 
and  fairer  and  more  of  the  world,  above  all  more 
ventilated  and  ventilating,  Herr  Stromberg,  whose 
defect  might  in  fact  have  seemed  that,  with  his 
constant  exhibition  of  the  stamp  received  by  him 
from  the  writings  of  Lord  Macaulay,  passages  of 
which  he  could  recite  by  heart,  and  the  circum 
stance  that  his  other  pupil,  William's  comrade  for 
a  time,  was  of  unmitigatedly  English,  that  is  of 
quasi-Byronic  association,  he  didn't  quite  rise 
to  the  full  gothic  standard.  Otherwise  indeed 
our  brother  moved  on  the  higher  plane  of  light 
and  air  and  ease,  and  above  all  of  enjoyed  society, 
that  we  felt  he  naturally  must.  Present  to  me 
yet  is  the  thrill  of  learning  from  him  that  his 


40    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

English  fellow-pupil  was  the  grandson,  if  I 
remember  rightly  the  degree  of  descent,  of  Mary 
Chaworth,  Byron's  "first  love/'  and  my  sense 
afterwards,  in  gaping  at  young  Mr.  Musters 
himself,  that  this  independently  romantic  contact 
Would  have  been  more  to  my  own  private  purpose 
at  least  than  the  most  emphasised  gothicism. 
None  the  less  do  I  regain  it  as  a  part  of  my  current 
vision  that  Frau  Stromberg,  who  was  young  and 
fair,  wrote  tragedies  as  well  as  made  pancakes  - 
which  were  served  to  each  consumer  double,  a 
thick  confiture  within  being  the  reason  of  this 
luxuriance,  and  being  also  a  note  beyond  our 
experience  in  the  Bonn-Gasse;  and  that  with  the 
printed  five  acts  of  a  certain  "Cleopatra"  before 
me,  read  aloud  in  the  first  instance  to  her  young 
inmates  and  by  my  brother  passed  on  to  me,  I 
lost  myself  in  the  view  of  I  scarce  knew  what  old- 
world  Germanic  grace,  positively,  or  little  court- 
city  practice  of  the  theatre:  these  things  so  lived 
in  the  small  thick  pamphlet,  "grey  paper  with 
blunt  type"  and  bristling,  to  my  discomfiture, 
with  descriptive  stage  directions,  vast  dense 
bracketed  tracts,  gothic  enough  in  all  conscience, 
as  to  which  I  could  already  begin  to  wonder 
whether  such  reinforcements  of  presentation 
proved  more  for  or  against  the  true  expressional 
essence  of  the  matter;  for  or  against,  that  is, 
there  being  nothing  at  all  so  dramatic,  so  charge- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    41 

able  with  meaning  and  picture,  as  speech,  of 
whatever  sort,  made  perfect.  Such  speculations, 
I  may  parenthesise,  might  well  have  been  fostered, 
and  doubtless  were,  by  an  impression  that  I  find 
commemorated  in  a  few  lines  of  a  letter  of 
my  father's  to  a  friend  in  America  —  he  having 
brought  us  on  to  Bonn,  introduced  us  to  our 
respective  caretakers  and  remained  long  enough 
to  have  had  an  evening  at  the  theatre,  to  which 
we  accompanied  him.  "We  had  Ristori  to  play 
Mary  Stuart  for  us  last  night  —  which  was  the 
vulture  counterfeiting  Jenny  Wren.  Every  little 
while  the  hoarse  exulting  voice,  the  sanguinary 
beak,  the  lurid  leer  of  menace,  and  the  relent 
less  talons  looked  forth  from  the  feathery  mass 
and  sickened  you  with  disgust.  She  would  do 
Elizabeth  better."  I  recall  the  performance  in 
every  feature,  as  well  as  my  absence  of  such  re 
serves,  though  quite  also  the  point  to  which  I  was 
impressed  by  the  utterance  of  them;  not  that  it 
didn't  leave  me  at  the  same  time  free  to  feel  that 
the  heroine  of  history  represented  could  scarce 
have  been  at  all  a  dove-like,  much  less  a  wren-like 
person.  She  had  indeed  on  Madame  Ristori's 
showing  prodigious  resources  of  militant  mobility 
-  of  what  in  fact  would  be  called  to-day  mobilisa 
tion.  Several  years  later  on  I  was  to  see  the 
actress  play  the  same  part  in  America;  and  then, 
if  I  am  not  mistaken,  was  to  note  scarce  more 


42    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

than  one  point;  the  awful  effect  on  any  histrionic 
case,  even  on  one  so  guardedly  artful  as  hers, 
of  having  been  dragged  round  the  globe  and  forced 
home,  so  far  as  might  be,  to  imperfect  compre 
hensions.  The  big  brush  had  come  fairly  to 
daub  the  canvas.  Let  the  above,  however,  serve 
in  particular  to  lead  in  as  many  examples  of  my 
father's  singularly  striking  and  personal  habit 
of  expression  and  weight  of  thought  as  these 
pages  may  find  room  for. 

The  one  difficulty  is  that  to  open  that  general 
door  into  the  limbo  of  old  letters,  charged  with 
their  exquisite  ghostly  appeal,  is  almost  to  sink 
into  depths  of  concession.  I  yield  here  for 
instance  to  the  claim  of  a  page  or  two  from 
William,  just  contemporary  and  addressed  to 
our  parents  in  Paris  —  and  yield  perhaps  but  for 
no  better  reason  than  that  of  the  small  historic 
value  or  recoverable  charm  that  I  am  moved  to 
find  in  its  illustrative  items.  The  reference  of 
its  later  lines  is  to  a  contemporary  cousin,  young 
and  blooming,  by  whom  I  have  already  ever  so 
lightly  brushed1  and  who  figured  quite  with  the 
grand  air  on  our  young  horizon;  the  only  daughter 
of  the  brightest  of  the  Albany  uncles  (by  that 
time  lost  and  mourned)  now  on  the  tour  of 
Europe  with  a  pair  of  protective  elders  for  her 
entrance  upon  life  and  at  that  hour  surrounding 

^'  A  Small  Boy  and  Others,  1913. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    43 

our  parents,  her  uncle  and  aunt,  with  a  notably 
voluminous  rustle  of  fresh  Paris  clothes,  the  far- 
spreading  drapery  of  the  more  and  more  draped 
and  flounced  and  "sloped"  second  Empire. 
This  friendly  frou-frou  almost  reached  our  ears, 
so  sociable  for  us  was  every  sound  of  her,  in  our 
far-off  Rhineland.  She  was  with  her  stature  and 
shape  the  finest  possible  person  to  carry  clothes, 
and  I  thought  of  her,  with  a  revival  of  the  old 
yearning  envy,  as  now  quite  transcendently 
orphaned  and  bereft,  dowered,  directed  and 
equipped. 

Your  hearts,  I  know,  would  have  been  melted  if  you 
had  had  a  view  of  us  this  Sunday  morning.  I  went 
directly  after  breakfast  for  the  boys,  and  though  H. 
had  an  "iron  stomach-ache,"  as  he  called  it,  we  went 
off  together  to  that  low  wooded  hill  which  the  Aunt 
could  see  from  her  window  when  you  were  here,  and 
walked  about  till  dinner-time,  H.  being  all  the  while  in 
great  pain.  In  one  part  we  found  a  platform  with  a 
stone  bench  commanding  a  view  of  the  whole  valley, 
and,  as  we  were  rather  tired,  sat  down  on  it,  H.  and 
Wilky  each  with  a  Once  a  Week,  while  I  tried  to  draw 
the  view  in  my  pocket-book.  We  wondered  what  our 
beloved  parents  were  doing  at  that  moment,  11.30,  and 
thought  you  must  all  have  been  in  your  salon,  Alice  at 
the  window  with  her  eyes  fixed  on  her  novel,  but  eating 
some  rich  fruit  that  Father  has  just  brought  in  for  her 
from  the  Palais  Royal,  and  the  lovely  Mother  and  Aunt 
in  armchairs,  their  hands  crossed  in  front  of  them, 
listening  to  Father,  who  walks  up  and  down  talking  of 
the  superiority  of  America  to  these  countries  after  all, 


44    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

and  how  much  better  it  is  we  should  have  done  with 
them.  We  wished,  oh  we  wished  we  could  have  been 
with  you  to  join  in  the  conversation  and  partake  of  the 
fruit.  We  got  up  from  the  seat  and  went  on  with  a 
heavy  sigh,  but  in  a  way  so  fraternal,  presenting  such  a 
sweet  picture  of  brotherly  unitedness  and  affection, 
that  it  would  have  done  you  good  to  see  us. 

And  so  it  is  every  day  that  we  meet  for  our  shorter 
walks  and  talks.  The  German  gets  on  slowly,  but  I 
notice  a  very  marked  improvement  in  talking.  I  have 
not  kept  at  it  so  hard  this  last  week  as  before,  and  I 
prevent  H.  from  working  his  eyes  out,  which  he  seems 
on  the  whole  rather  less  inclined  to  do.  I  am  going  to 
read  as  much  as  I  can  the  rest  of  the  time  we  are  here. 
It  seems  a  mere  process  of  soaking,  requiring  no  mental 
effort,  but  only  time  and  steady  patience.  My  room  is 
very  comfortable  now  I've  got  used  to  it,  and  I  have 
a  pair  of  slippers  of  green  plush  heavy  and  strong 
enough  to  last  all  my  life  and  then  be  worn  by  my 
children.  The  photograph  of  our  Zoffingen  group  has 
come,  which  gives  me  a  moustache  big  enough  for  three 
lifeguardsmen.  Tell  us  something  more  about  Mary 
Helen.  How  long  does  she  expect  to  stay  in  Europe, 
and  who  is  this  Dr.  Adams  —  the  man  she  is  engaged 
to?  She  directs  me  to  write  to  her  in  his  care  —  so 
that  I  wish  you  would  ask  her,  as  she  says  she  hopes 
to  meet  me,  whether  I  shall  still  address  her  as  Miss 
James?  Of  course  it  would  be  painful,  but  I  think  I 
could  do  it  if  Adams  weren't  there.  Let  the  delicious 
little  grey-eyed  Alice  be  locked  up  alone  on  the  day 
after  the  receipt  of  this  with  paper  and  envelopes  to 
write  a  letter  unassisted,  uncorrected  and  unpunctu- 
ated  to  her  loving  brothers,  who  would  send  her  novels 
and  peaches  if  they  could.  What  a  blessing  it  is  to  have 
such  parents,  such  a  perfect  Mother  and  magnificent 
Father  and  dear  good  Aunt  and  splendid  little  Sister! 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    45 

I  may  mention  that  Mary  Helen  was  not 
"engaged"  to  the  gentleman  above-mentioned, 
and  was  eventually  to  marry  the  late  Alfred 
Grymes,  originally  of  Louisiana.  Also  that  a 
letter  subsequent  to  this,  apparently  of  the  first 
days  in  September,  sounds  to  his  father  the  first 
note  of  my  brother's  definite  personal  preference, 
as  he  seemed  lately  and  increasingly,  though  not 
in  conditions  markedly  propitious,  to  have  become 
aware  of  it,  for  an  adoption  of  the  "artistic 
career."  It  was  an  odd  enough  circumstance,  in 
respect  to  the  attested  blood  in  our  veins,  that  no 
less  than  three  of  our  father's  children,  with  two 
of  his  grandsons  to  add  to  these,  and  with  a  col 
lateral  addendum  representing  seven,  in  all,  of  our 
grandfather's,  William  James's,  descendants  in 
three  generations,  should  have  found  the  artistic 
career  in  general  and  the  painter's  trade  in  par 
ticular  irresistibly  solicit  them. 


I  wish  you  would  as  you  promised  set  down  as  clearly 
as  you  can  on  paper  what  your  idea  of  the  nature  of 
Art  is,  because  I  do  not,  probably,  understand  it  fully, 
and  should  like  to  have  it  presented  in  a  form  that  I 
might  think  over  at  my  leisure.  I  wish  you  would  do 
so  as  fully  as  you  conveniently  can,  so  that  I  may 
ruminate  it  —  and  I  won't  say  more  about  it  till  I  have 
heard  from  you  again.  As  for  what  your  last  letter 
did  contain,  what  can  I  do  but  thank  you  for  every 
word  of  it  and  assure  you  that  they  went  to  the  right 
spot.  Having  such  a  Father  with  us,  how  can  we  be 


46    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

other  than  in  some  measure  worthy  of  him?  —  if  not 
perhaps  as  eminently  so  as  the  distance  leads  his  fond 
heart  to  imagine.  I  never  value  him  so  much  as  when 
I  am  away  from  him.  At  home  I  see  only  his  striking 
defects,  but  here  he  seems  all  perfection,  and  I  wonder 
as  I  write  why  I  didn't  cherish  him  more  when  he  was 
beside  me.  I  beg  darling  old  Mother's  forgiveness  too 
for  the  rude  and  dastardly  way  in  which  I  snub  her, 
and  the  Aunt  for  the  impatience  and  violence  I  have 
always  shown  her.  I  shall  be  a  perfect  sherry-cobbler 
to  both  of  them,  and  to  the  small  Alice  too,  young  as 
she  may  be  for  such  treats. 

I  have  just  got  home  from  dining  with  the  boys  and 
their  Humperts;  where  I  found  the  Doctor  as  genial 
as  ever  and  the  two  old  ladies  perfect  characters  for 
Dickens.  They  have  been  so  shut  out  from  the  world 
and  melting  together  so  long  by  the  kitchen  fire  that 
the  minds  of  both  have  become  fused  into  one,  and 
then  seem  to  constitute  a  sort  of  two-bodied  individual. 
I  never  saw  anything  more  curious  than  the  way  they 
sit  mumbling  together  at  the  end  of  the  table,  each 
using  simultaneously  the  same  comment  if  anything 
said  at  our  end  strikes  their  ear.  H.  pegs  away  pretty 
stoutly,  but  I  don't  think  you  need  worry  about  him. 
He  and  Wilky  appear  to  get  on  in  great  harmony  and 
enliven  themselves  occasionally  by  brotherly  trials  of 
strength,  quite  good-natured,  in  their  room,  when  excess 
of  labour  has  made  them  sleepy  or  heavy.  In  these 
sometimes  one,  sometimes  the  other  is  victorious. 
They  often  pay  me  a  visit  here  while  I  am  dressing, 
which  of  course  is  highly  convenient  —  and  I  have  more 
than  once  been  with  them  early  enough  to  be  present  at 
Wilky's  tumble  out  of  bed  and  consequent  awakening, 
with  the  call  on  the  already-at-work  H.:  "Why  the 
mischief  didn't  you  stop  me?"  Wilky  and  I  walked 
to  Rolandseck  yesterday  afternoon,  and  after  a  furious 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    47 

race  back  to  the  station  found  ourselves  too  late  for 
the  train  by  a  second.  So  we  took  a  boat  and  rowed 
down  here,  which  was  delightful.  We  are  going  to 
put  H.  through  a  splashing  good  walk  daily.  A  thou 
sand  thanks  to  the  cherry-lipped,  apricot-nosed, 
double-chinned  little  Sister  for  her  strongly  dashed-off 
letter,  which  inflamed  the  hearts  of  her  lonely  brothers 
with  an  intense  longing  to  smack  her  celestial  cheeks. 


Ill 

I  HAVE  before  me  another  communication  of 
about  the  same  moment,  a  letter  addressed  to 
his  father  in  Paris  within  that  month;  from 
which,  in  spite  of  its  lively  interest  as  I  hold,  I 
cull  nothing  —  and  precisely  because  of  that  in 
terest,  which  prescribes  for  it  a  later  appearance 
in  conditions  in  which  it  may  be  given  entire. 
William  is  from  this  season  on,  to  my  sense,  so 
livingly  and  admirably  reflected  in  his  letters, 
which  were  happily  through  much  of  his  career 
both  numerous  and  highly  characteristic,  that  I 
feel  them  particularly  plead,  in  those  cases  in 
which  they  most  testify  to  his  personal  history, 
for  the  separate  gathered  presentation  that 
happily  awaits  them.  There  best  may  figure 
the  serious  and  reasoned  reply  drawn  from  him 
by  some  assuredly  characteristic  enough  com 
munication  of  our  parent's  own  in  respect  to  his 
declared  preference  for  a  painter's  life  over  any 
other.  Lost  is  this  original  and,  in  the  light  of 
later  matters,  sufficiently  quaint  declaration,  and 
lost  the  paternal  protest  answered  by  my  brother 
from  Bonn  and  anything  but  infelicitous,  on  its 
side,  so  far  as  the  truer  apprehension  went,  under 

48 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    49 

the  showing  of  the  time  to  come.  The  only 
thing  was  that  our  father  had  a  wonderful  way 
of  being  essentially  right  without  being  practically 
or,  as  it  were,  vulgarly,  determinant,  and  that 
this  relegation  of  his  grounds  of  contention  to  the 
sphere  of  the  non-immediate,  the  but  indirectly 
urgent,  from  the  point  of  view  of  the  thing 
really  to  do,  couldn't  but  often  cause  impatience 
in  young  breasts  conscious  of  gifts  or  desires  or 
ideals  of  which  the  very  sign  and  warrant,  the 
truth  they  were  known  by,  was  that  they  were 
susceptible  of  application.  It  was  in  no  world 
of  close  application  that  our  wondrous  parent 
moved,  and  his  indifference  at  the  first  blush  to 
the  manifestation  of  special  and  marketable 
talents  and  faculties,  restlessly  outward  purposes 
of  whatever  would-be  "successful"  sort,  was  apt 
to  be  surpassable  only  by  his  delight  subsequently 
taken  in  our  attested  and  visible  results,  the  very 
fruits  of  application;  as  to  which  the  possibility, 
perhaps  even  the  virtual  guarantee,  hadn't  so 
much  left  him  cold  in  advance  as  made  him 
adversely  and  "spiritually"  hot.  The  sense  of 
that  word  was  the  most  living  thing  in  the  world 
for  him  —  to  the  point  that  the  spiritual  simply 
meant  to  him  the  practical  and  the  successful, 
so  far  as  he  could  get  into  touch  with  such 
denominations,  or  so  far,  that  is,  as  he  could 
face  them  or  care  for  them  a  priori.  Fortunately, 


50    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

as  he  had  observational  powers  of  the  happiest, 
perceptions  —  perceptions  of  character  and  value, 
perceptions  of  relation  and  effect,  perceptions  in 
short  of  the  whole  —  turned  to  the  ground  sensibly 
beneath  our  feet,  as  well  as  a  splendid,  an  extra 
ordinarily  animated  and,  so  far  as  he  himself 
at  least  was  concerned,  guiding  and  governing 
soul,  justice  and  generosity  always  eventually 
played  up,  the  case  worked  itself  happily  out,  and 
before  we  knew  it  he  had  found  it  quite  the 
rightest  of  all  cases,  while  we  on  our  side  had  had 
the  liveliest,  and  certainly  the  most  amusing  and 
civilising,  moral  or,  as  he  would  have  insisted, 
spiritual  recreation  by  the  way. 

My  brother  challenges  him,  with  a  beautiful 
deference,  on  the  imputed  damage  to  what  might 
be  best  in  a  man  by  the  professional  pursuit  of 
"art"  —  which  he  appears  to  have  set  forth  with 
characteristic  emphasis;  and  I  take  the  example 
for  probably  one  of  the  rarest  in  all  the  so  copious 
annals  of  parental  opposition  to  the  aesthetic  as 
distinguished  from  some  other  more  respectable 
course.  What  was  marked  in  our  father's  prime 
uneasiness  in  presence  of  any  particular  form  of 
success  we  might,  according  to  our  lights  as  then 
glimmering,  propose  to  invoke  was  that  it  bravely, 
or  with  such  inward  assurance,  dispensed  with 
any  suggestion  of  an  alternative.  What  we  were 
to  do  instead  was  just  to  be  something,  something 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    51 

unconnected  with  specific  doing,  something  free 
and  uncommitted,  something  finer  in  short  than 
being  that,  whatever  it  was,  might  consist  of. 
The  "career  of  art"  has  again  and  again  been 
deprecated  and  denounced,  on  the  lips  of  anxiety 
or  authority,  as  a  departure  from  the  career^ of 
business,  of  industry  and  respectabilityj:jrthe 
so-called  regular  life,  but  it  was  perhaps  never 
elsewhere  to  know  dissuasion  on  the  very  ground 
of  its  failing  to  uplift  the  spirit  in  the  ways  it 
most  pretends  to.  I  must  in  fairness  add, 
however,  that  if  the  uneasiness  I  here  refer  to 
continued,  and  quite  by  exception  as  compared 
with  the  development  of  other  like  episodes, 
during  the  whole  of  my  brother's  fortunately  but 
little  prolonged  studio  season,  it  was  really  because 
more  alternatives  swarmed  before  our  parent's 
eyes,  in  the  cause,  than  he  could  bring  himself 
to  simplify  it  by  naming.  He  apprehended  ever 
so  deeply  and  tenderly  his  eldest  son's  other 
genius  —  as  to  which  he  was  to  be  so  justified; 
though  this  indeed  was  not  to  alter  the  fact  that 
when  afterwards  that  subject  went  in,  by  a 
wondrous  reaction,  for  the  pursuit  of  science, 
first  of  chemistry  and  then  of  anatomy  and 
physiology  and  medicine,  with  psychology  and 
philosophy  at  last  piling  up  the  record,  the  rich 
malaise  at  every  turn  characteristically  betrayed 
itself,  each  of  these  surrenders  being,  by  the 


52    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

measure  of  them  in  the  parental  imagination, 
so  comparatively  narrowing.  That  was  the 
nearest  approach  to  any  plea  for  some  other 
application  of  the  spirit  —  that  they  were  narrow 
ing.  When  I  myself,  later  on,  began  to  "write" 
it  was  breathed  upon  me  with  the  finest  bewilder 
ing  eloquence,  with  a  power  of  suggestion  in 
truth  which  I  fairly  now  count  it  a  gain  to  have 
felt  play  over  me,  that  this  too  was  narrowing. 
On  the  subsequent  history  of  which  high  paradox 
no  better  comment  could  occur  to  me  than  my 
find  of  a  passage  in  a  letter  long  subsequently 
addressed  to  Mr.  James  T.  Fields,  then  proprietor 
and  editor  of  the  Atlantic  Monthly  magazine  —  a 
letter  under  date  of  May  1868  and  referring 
clearly  to  some  published  remarks  on  a  certain 
young  writer  which  did  violence  to  the  blessedly 
quick  paternal  prejudice. 

I  had  no  sooner  left  your  sanctum  yesterday  than  I 
was  afflicted  to  remember  how  I  had  profaned  it  by  my 
unmeasured  talk  about  poor  H.  Please  forget  it  utterly. 
I  don't  know  how  it  is  with  better  men,  but  the  parental 
sentiment  is  so  fiendish  a  thing  with  me  that  if  anyone 
attempt  to  slay  my  young,  especially  in  a  clandestine 
way,  or  out  of  a  pious  regard  (e.g.)  to  the  welfare  of  the 
souls  comprised  in  the  diocese  of  the  Atlantic,  I  can't 
help  devoting  him  bag  and  baggage  to  the  infernal  gods. 
I  am  not  aware  of  my  animus  until  I  catch,  as  yester 
day,  a  courteous  ear;  then  the  -unholy  fire  flames 
forth  at  such  a  rate  as  to  leave  me  no  doubt  on  reflec 
tion  where  it  was  originally  lighted. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    53 

Almost  all  my  dear  father  is  there,  making  the 
faded  page  to-day  inexpressibly  touching  to  me; 
his  passionate  tenderness,  his  infinite  capacity 
for  reaction  on  reaction,  a  force  in  him  fruitful 
in  so  many  more  directions  than  any  high  smooth 
ness  of  parti-pris  could  be,  and  his  beautiful 
fresh  individual  utterance,  always  so  stamped 
with  the  very  whole  of  him.  The  few  lines  make 
for  me,  after  all  the  years,  a  sort  of  silver  key, 
so  exquisitely  fitting,  to  the  treasure  of  living 
intercourse,  of  a  domestic  air  quickened  and 
infinitely  coloured,  comprised  in  all  qjir  younger 
time.  The  renewed  sense  of  which,  however, 
has  carried  me  for  the  moment  too  far  from  the 
straighter  line  of  my  narrative. 

The  author  of  the  young  letter  of  which  I 
have  deferred  presentation  met  in  Paris,  shortly 
after  that  date,  the  other  party  to  the  discussion; 
and  the  impression  of  the  endless  day  of  our 
journey,  my  elder  and  my  younger  brothers' 
and  mine,  from  Bonn  to  that  city,  has  scarcely 
faded  from  me.  The  railway  service  was  so 
little  then  what  it  has  become  that  I  even  marvel 
at  our  having  made  our  connections  between  our 
early  rise  in  the  Bonn-Gasse  and  our  midnight 
tumble  into  bed  at  the  Hotel  des  Trois  Empereurs 
in  the  Place  du  Palais  Royal;  a  still-felt  rapture, 
a  revelation  of  the  Parisian  idea  of  bed  after  the 
rude  German  conception,  our  sore  discipline  for 


54    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

so  many  weeks.  I  remember  Cologne  and  its 
cathedral  almost  in  the  bland  dawn,  and  our 
fresh  start  thence  for  Strasbourg,  now  clearly 
recognised,  alas,  as  a  start  back  to  America,  to 
which  it  had  been  of  a  sudden  settled  that  we  were, 
still  with  a  fine  inconsequence,  to  return.  We 
had  seen  Cologne  cathedral  by  excursion  from 
Bonn,  but  we  saw  Strasbourg,  to  my  sorrow 
until  a  far  later  occasion  soothed  it,  only  as  a 
mild  monster  behind  bars,  that  is  above  chimneys, 
housetops  and  fortifications;  a  loss  not  made 
up  to  me  by  other  impressions  or  particulars, 
vivid  and  significant  as  I  found  myself  none  the 
less  supposing  several  of  these.  Those  were  the 
September  days  in  which  French  society,  so  far  as 
it  was  of  the  Empire  at  least,  moved  more  or 
less  in  its  mass  upon  Homburg  and  Baden-Baden; 
and  we  met  it  in  expressive  samples,  and  in 
advance  and  retreat,  during  our  incessant  stops, 
those  long-time  old  stops,  unknown  to  the 
modern  age,  when  everyone  appeared  to  alight 
and  walk  about  with  the  animation  of  prisoners 
suddenly  pardoned,  and  ask  for  conveniences, 
and  clamour  for  food,  and  get  mixed  with  the 
always  apparently  still  dustier  people  of  opposite 
trains  drawn  up  for  the  same  purposes.  We 
appeared  to  be  concerned  with  none  but  first- 
class  carriages,  as  an  effect  of  which  our  own  was 
partly  occupied,  the  livelong  day,  by  the  gens  of 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    55 

a  noble  French  house  as  to  which  we  thus  had 
frequent  revelations  —  a  pair  of  footmen  and  a 
lady's  maid,  types  of  servile  impudence  taking 
its  ease,  who  chattered  by  the  hour  for  our 
wonderstruck  ears,  treating  them  to  their  first 
echo  of  the  strange  underworld*,  the  sustaining 
vulgarity,  of  existences  classified  as  "great." 
They  opened  vistas,  and  I  remember  how  when, 
much  later,  I  came  to  consider  the  designed 
picture,  first  in  Edmond  About  and  then  in 
Alphonse  Daudet,  of  fifty  features  symptomatic  of 
the  social  pace  at  which  the  glittering  regime 
hurried  to  its  end,  there  came  back  to  me  the 
breath  of  this  sidewind  of  the  frenzied  dance  that 
we  had  caught  during  those  numerous  and  so  far 
from  edifying  hours  in  our  fine  old  deep-seated 
compartment.  The  impression,  I  now  at  any 
rate  perfectly  recover,  was  one  that  could  feed 
full  enough  any  optimism  of  the  appointedly 
modest  condition.  It  was  true  that  Madame 
la  Marquise,  who  was  young  and  good-natured 
and  pretty  without  beauty,  and  unmistakably 
"great,"  exhaling  from  afar,  as  I  encouraged 
myself  to  imagine,  the  scented  air  of  the  Tuileries, 
came  on  occasion  and  looked  in  on  us  and  smiled, 
and  even  pouted,  through  her  elegant  patience; 
so  that  she  at  least,  I  recollect,  caused  to  swim 
before  me  somehow  such  a  view  of  happy  privilege 
at  the  highest  pitch  as  made  me  sigh  the  more 


56    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

sharply,  even  if  the  less  professedly,  for  our 
turning  our  backs  on  the  complex  order,  the 
European,  fresh  to  me  still,  in  which  contrasts 
flared  and  flourished  and  through  which  discrimi 
nation  could  unexhaustedly  riot  —  pointing  so 
many  more  morals,  withal,  if  that  was  the  benefit 
it  was  supposed  to  be,  than  we  should  find 
pretexts  for  "on  the  other  side."  We  were 
to  fall  as  soon  as  we  were  at  home  again  to 
reading  the  Revue  des  Deux  Mondes  —  though 
doubtless  again  I  should  speak  here,  with  any 
emphasis,  but  for  myself;  my  chin,  in  Europe, 
had  scarce  risen  to  the  level  of  that  publication; 
but  at  Newport  in  Rhode  Island,  our  next 
following  place  of  sojourn,  I  speedily  shot  up  so 
as  quite  to  bend  down  to  it:  it  took  its  place 
therewith  as  the  very  headspring  of  culture,  a 
mainstay  in  exile,  and  as  opening  wide  in  especial 
the  doors  of  that  fictive  portrayal  of  a  society 
which  put  a  price,  for  the  brooding  young  reader, 
on  cases,  on  cadres,  in  the  Revue  parlance,  already 
constituted  and  propitiously  lighted.  Then  it 
was  that  the  special  tension  of  the  dragged-out 
day  from  Cologne  to  Paris  proved,  on  the  ab- 
surdest  scale,  a  preparation,  justified  itself  as  a 
vivid  point  of  reference:  I  was  to  know  what  the 
high  periodical  meant  when  I  encountered  in  its 
etudes  de  moeurs  the  blue-chinned  corruptible,  not 
to  say  corrupt,  larbin  and  the  smart  soubrette; 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    57 

it  was  above  all  a  blessing  to  feel  myself,  in  the 
perusal  of  M.  Octave  Feuillet,  an  education,  as  I 
supposed,  of  the  taste,  not  at  a  marked  dis 
advantage;  since  who  but  the  Petite  Comtesse 
herself  had  swung  her  crinoline  in  and  out  of  my 
prospect, ,  or,  ta  put  it  better,  of  my  preserved 
past,  on  one  of  my  occasions  of  acutest  recep 
tivity? 

The  truth  was  that  acute,  that  quite  desperate 
receptivity  set  in  for  me,  under  a  law  of  its  own  - 
may  really  be  described  as  having  quite  raged 
for  me  —  from  the  moment  our  general  face,  by 
the  restless  parental  decree  (born  not  a  little 
of  parental  homesickness  and  reinforced  by  a 
theory  of  that  complaint  on  our  own  part,  we 
having  somehow  in  Europe  "no  companions," 
none  but  mere  parents  themselves),  had  been 
turned  again  to  the  quarter  in  which  there  would 
assuredly  be  welcomes  and  freedoms  and  un 
checked  appropriations,  not  to  say  also  cousins, 
of  both  sexes  and  of  a  more  and  more  engaging 
time  of  life,  cousins  kept  and  tended  and  adorned 
for  us  in  our  absence,  together  with  the  solicita 
tion  for  our  favour  of  possible,  though  oh  so  just 
barely  possible,  habitats  before  which  the  range 
of  Europe  paled;  but  which,  nevertheless,  to 
my  aching  fancy,  meant  premature  abdication, 
sacrifice  and,  in  one  dreadful  word,  failure.  I 
had  had  cousins,  naturally,  in  the  countries  we 


58    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

were  quitting,  but  to  a  limited  degree;  yet  I 
think  I  already  knew  I  had  had  companions  in  as 
full  a  measure  as  any  I  was  still  to  know  - 
inasmuch  as  my  imagination  made  out  one,  in 
the  complex  order  and  the  coloured  air,  almost 
wherever  I  turned;  and,  inasmuch  as,  further, 
to  live  by  the  imagination  was  to  live  almost  only 
in  that  way,  so  to  foresee  the  comparative,  not 
to  say  the  absolute,  absence  of  tonic  accent  in 
the  appearances  complacently  awaiting  me,  as 
well  as  to  forecast  in  these  appearances,  at  the 
best,  a  greater  paucity,  was  really  to  enjoy  a 
sharp  prevision  of  dearth.  Certain  it  is  that 
those  supreme  moments  of  Paris,  those  after-days 
at  the  Trois  Empereurs,  were  to  flush  for  me,  as 
they  ebbed,  with  images  and  visions;  judged  by 
any  achieved  act  of  possession  I  hadn't  assuredly 
much  to  give  up,  but  intensity  of  sentiment, 
resting  on  a  good  disposition,  makes  for  its  own 
sake  the  most  of  opportunity,  and  I  buried  my 
associations,  which  had  been  in  a  manner  till 
lately  my  hopes  as  well,  with  all  decent  dignity 
and  tenderness.  These  more  or  less  secret  ob 
sequies  lent  to  our  further  brief  delay  a  quality 
of  suppressed  excitement;  the  "old-world" 
hours  were  numbered  too  dreadfully  -  -  had  shrunk 
but  to  a  handful:  I  had  waked  up  to  that,  as 
with  a  passionate  even  if  private  need  for  gather 
ing  in  and  saving,  on  the  morrow  of  our  reaching 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    59 

our  final  sticking-place:  I  had  slipped  from  my 
so  cushioned  sleep,  my  canopied  couch,  to  hang, 
from  the  balcony  of  our  quatrieme,  my  brothers' 
and  mine,  over  that  Place  du  Palais  Royal  and 
up  against  that  sculptured  and  storied  fagade  of 
the  new  Louvre  which  seemed  to  me  then  to 
represent,  in  its  strength,  the  capacity  and 
chiselled  rim  of  some  such  potent  vivifying  cup 
as  it  might  have  been  given  us,  under  a  happier 
arrangement,  to  taste  now  in  its  fulness  and  with 
a  braver  sense  for  it.  Over  against  us  on  the 
great  palace  wall,  as  I  make  out  —  if  not  for  that 
occasion  then  for  some  other  —  were  statues  of 
heroes,  Napoleon's  young  generals,  Hoche,  Mar- 
ceau,  Desaix  or  whoever,  such  a  galaxy  as  never 
was  or  should  ever  be  again  for  splendid  monu 
mental  reference;  and  what  it  somehow  came  to 
was  that  here  massed  itself  the  shining  second 
Empire,  over  which  they  stood  straight  aloft  and 
on  guard,  like  archangels  of  the  sword,  and  that 
the  whole  thing  was  a  high-pitched  wonder  and 
splendour,  which  we  had  already,  in  our  small 
gaping  way,  got  into  a  sort  of  relation  with  and 
which  would  have  ever  so  much  more  ever  so 
thrillingly  to  give  us.  What  it  would  give  us 
loomed  but  vaguely  enough  out  of  the  great  hum 
and  the  great  toned  perspective,  and  withal  the 
great  noble  expense,  of  which  we  had  constant 
reminder;  but  that  we  were  present  at  something 


60    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

it  would  be  always  after  accounted  a  privilege 
to  have  been  concerned  with,  and  that  we  were 
perversely  and  inconsiderately  dropping  out  of 
it,  and  for  a  reason,  so  far  as  there  might  be  a 
reason,  that  was  scarcely  less  than  strange  —  all 
this  loomed  large  to  me  as  our  interval  shrank, 
and  I  even  ask  myself  before  the  memory  of  it 
whether  I  was  ever  again  in  the  later  and  more 
encompassing  and  accommodating  years  to  have 
in  those  places  so  rich  a  weight  of  consciousness 
to  carry  or  so  grand  a  presumption  of  joy.  The 
presumption  so  boldly  entertained  was,  if  you 
please,  of  what  the  whole  thing  meant.  It 
meant,  immensely,  the  glittering  regime,  and 
that  meant  in  turn,  prodigiously,  something  that 
would  probably  never  be  meant  quite  to  any 
such  tune  again:  so  much  one  positively  and 
however  absurdly  said  to  one's  self  as  one  stood 
up  on  the  high  balcony  to  the  great  insolence  of 
the  Louvre  and  to  all  the  history,  all  the  glory 
again  and  all  the  imposed  applause,  not  to  say 
worship,  and  not  to  speak  of  the  implied  inferi 
ority,  on  the  part  of  everything  else,  that  it 
represented.  And  the  sense  was  of  course  not 
less  while  one  haunted  at  odd  hours  the  arcades 
and  glass  galleries  of  the  Palais  Royal  close  at 
hand  —  as  if  to  store  up,  for  all  the  world,  treasures 
of  impression  that  might  be  gnawed,  in  seasons 
or  places  of  want,  like  winter  pears  or  a  squirrel's 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    61 

hoard  of  nuts,  and  so  perhaps  keep  one  alive,  as 
to  one's  most  vital  faculty  above-mentioned, 
till  one  should  somehow  or  other  be  able  to 
scramble  back. 

The  particular  ground  for  our  defection,  which 
I  obscurely  pronounced  mistaken,  was  that  since 
William  was  to  embrace  the  artistic  career  —  and 
freedom  for  this  experiment  had  been  after  all, 
as  I  repeat  that  it  was  always  in  like  cases  to  be, 
not  in  the  least  grudgingly  granted  him  —  our 
return  to  America  would  place  him  in  prompt 
and  happy  relation  to  William  Hunt,  then  the 
most  distinguished  of  our  painters  as  well  as  one 
of  the  most  original  and  delightful  of  men,  and 
who  had  cordially  assured  us  that  he  would 
welcome  such  a  pupil.  This  was  judged  among 
us  at  large,  other  considerations  aiding,  a  sound 
basis  for  action;  but  never  surely  had  so  odd  a 
motive  operated  for  a  break  with  the  spell  of 
Paris.  We  named  the  motive  generally,  I  think, 
and  to  the  credit  of  our  earnest  good  faith,  with 
confidence  —  and  I  am  of  course  not  sure  how 
often  our  dear  father  may  not  explicatively 
have  mentioned  the  shy  fact  that  he  himself  in 
any  case  had  gradually  ceased  to  "like"  Europe. 
This  affects  me  at  present  as  in  the  highest 
degree  natural:  it  was  to  be  his  fortune  for  the 
rest  of  his  life  to  find  himself,  as  a  worker  in  his 
own  field  and  as  to  what  he  held  most  dear, 


62    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

scantly  enough  heeded,  reported  or  assimilated 
even  in  his  own  air,  no  brisk  conductor  at  any 
time  of  his  remarkable  voice;  but  in  Europe  his 
isolation  had  been  utter  —  he  had  there  had  the 
sense  of  playing  his  mature  and  ardent  thought 
over  great  dense  constituted  presences  and  opaque 
surfaces  that  could  by  their  very  nature  scarce 
give  back  so  much  as  a  shudder.  No  more 
admirable  case  of  apostolic  energy  combined 
with  philosophic  patience,  of  constancy  of  con 
viction  and  solitary  singleness  of  production 
unperturbed,  can  I  well  conceive;  and  I  certainly 
came  later  on  to  rejoice  in  his  having  had  after 
a  certain  date  to  walk,  if  there  was  a  preference, 
rather  in  the  thin  wilderness  than  in  the  thick. 
I  dare  say  that  when  we  returned  to  America 
toward  the  end  of  1860,  some  five  years  and  a 
half  after  our  departure,  it  may  have  been  with 
illusions  not  a  few  for  him  about  the  nature  of 
the  desert,  or  in  other  words  about  the  degree  of 
sensibility  of  the  public,  there  awaiting  him;  but 
the  pretext  given  him  by  his  so  prized  and 
admired  eldest  son  was  at  the  worst,  and  however 
eccentric  our  action,  inspiring:  I  alone  of  the 
family  perhaps  made  bold  not  to  say  quite 
directly  or  literally  that  we  went  home  to  learn  to 
paint.  People  stared  or  laughed  when  we  said 
it,  and  I  disliked  their  thinking  us  so  simple  - 
though  dreaming  too  a  little  perhaps  that  they 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER  J>$ 

might  have  been  struck  with  our  patriotism. 
This  however  conveyed  but  a  chill  the  more  - 
since  we  didn't  in  the  least  go  to  our  friend,  who 
had  been  Couture's  and  Frere's  pupil,  who  had 
spent  years  in  France  and  of  whom  it  was  the 
common  belief  that  you  couldn't  for  the  life  of 
you  tell  him  from  a  French  painter,  because  he 
was  patriotic;  but  because  he  was  distinguished 
and  accomplished,  charming  and  kind,  and 
above  all  known  to  us  and  thereby  in  a  manner 
guaranteed.  He  looked,  as  people  get  to  look 
under  such  enjoyed  or  even  suffered  exposures, 
extremely  like  a  Frenchman,  and,  what  was 
noteworthy,  still  more  like  a  sculptor  of  the  race 
than  a  painter;  which  doubtless  had  to  do  with 
my  personally,  though  I  hope,  in  present  culti 
vated  anxiety,  not  too  officiously,  sighing  at  all 
the  explanation  the  whole  thing  took.  I  am 
bound  to  add  none  the  less  that  later  on,  repatri 
ated  and,  as  to  my  few  contacts,  reassured,  I 
found  this  amount,  the  apprehension  of  which 
had  haunted  me,  no  great  charge;  and  seem 
even  to  make  out  that  for  the  first  six  months  of 
our  Newport  phase  at  least  we  might  have  passed 
for  strikingly  wise.  For  here  was,  beyond  doubt, 
a  genial,  an  admirable  master;  and  here  also  - 
at  such  a  rate  did  sparse  individuals,  scattered 
notches  in  the  long  plain  stick,  count  —  was 
John  La  Farge.  Here  moreover  —  here  and  every- 


64    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

where  about  me,  before  we  could  quite  turn 
round --was  the  War,  with  its  infinite,  its  truly 
quite  humiliating  correction  of  my  (as  I  now  can 
but  so  far  call  it)  fatuous  little  confidence  that 
"appearances,"  on  the  native  scene,  would  run 
short.  They  were  in  the  event,  taking  one 
thing  with  another,  never  to  hold  out  for  me  as 
they  held  during  those  four  years.  Wondrous 
this  force  in  them  as  I  at  present  look  back  - 
wondrous  I  mean  in  view  of  that  indirectness  of 
its  play  which  my  conditions  confined  me,  with 
such  private,  though  I  must  add,  alas,  such 
helplessly  unapplied  resentment,  to  knowing  it 
by.  If  the  force  was  great  the  attenuation  of 
its  reach  was  none  the  less  preappointed  and 
constant;  so  that  the  case  must  have  come  back 
again  but  to  the  degree  —  call  it  too,  frankly,  the 
force  —  of  one's  sensibility,  or  in  other  words  the 
blest  resource,  the  supremely  breatheable  and 
thereby  nourishing  and  favouring  air  of  one's 
imaginative  life.  There  were  of  a  truth  during 
that  time  probably  more  appearances  at  one's 
command  in  the  way  of  felt  aspects,  images, 
apprehended  living  relations  and  impressions  of 
the  stress  of  life,  than  during  any  other  season 
one  was  to  know;  only  doubtless  with  more  of 
the  work  of  their  figuring  to  their  utmost,  their 
giving  all  they  could,  to  do  by  one's  self  and,  in 
the  last  resort,  deep  within  one's  breast.  The 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    65 

point  to  be  made  just  here,  in  any  case,  is  that  if 
we  had  not  recrossed  the  sea,  by  way,  rather, 
of  such  an  anticlimax,  to  William  Hunt,  we 
should  certainly  with  brief  delay  have  found 
ourselves  doing  it,  on  the  first  alarm  of  War,  for 
the  experience  I  thus  too  summarily  glance  at 
and  which  I  don't  pretend  to  speak  of  as  all 
my  own. 


IV 

NEWPORT,  with  repatriation  accepted, 
would  have  been  on  many  grounds  in 
evitable,  I  think  —  as  it  was  to  remain 
inevitable  for  several  years,  and  this  quite  apart 
from  William's  having  to  paint;  since  if  I  spoke 
just  now  of  the  sweep  of  our  view,  from  over 
the  water,  of  a  continent,  or  well-nigh,  waiting 
to  receive  us,  the  eligibility  of  its  innumerable 
sites  was  a  matter  much  more  of  our  simplified, 
our  almost  distressfully  uninvolved  and  uncon 
nected  state  than  of  the  inherent  virtue  of  this, 
that  or  the  other  particular  group  of  local  condi 
tions.  Our  parents  had  for  us  no  definite  project 
but  to  be  liberally  "good"  -in  other  words  so 
good  that  the  presumption  of  our  being  so  would 
literally  operate  anywhere  and  anyhow,  would 
really  amount  in  itself  to  a  sort  of  situated 
state,  a  sufficient  prime  position,  and  leave  other 
circumstances  comparatively  irrelevant.  What 
would  infallibly  have  occurred  at  the  best,  how 
ever,  was  what  did  punctually  happen  —  its  having 
to  be  definitely  gathered  that,  though  we  might 
apparently  be  good,  as  I  say,  almost  on  any  ground, 
there  was  but  one  place  in  which  we  should  even 

66 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    67 

at  a  restricted  pitch  be  well:  Newport  imposed 
itself  at  that  period  to  so  remarkable  a  degree  as 
the  one  right  residence,  in  all  our  great  country, 
for  those  tainted,  under  whatever  attenuations, 
with  the  quality  and  the  effect  of  detachment. 
The  effect  of  detachment  was  the  fact  of  the 
experience  of  Europe.  Detachment  might  of 
course  have  come  from  many  causes,  but  it  truly 
came  in  most  cases  but  from  one,  though  that  a 
fairly  merciless:  it  came  from  the  experience  of 
Europe,  and  I  think  was  on  the  whole  regarded 
as  —  what  it  could  only  have  been  in  the  sphere 
of  intimacy  and  secrecy  felt  to  be  —  without  an 
absolute  remedy.  As  comparatively  remedial 
Newport  none  the  less  figured,  and  this  for 
sundry  reasons  into  the  detail  of  which  I  needn't 
go.  Its  rare  distinction  and  precious  attribute 
was  that,  being  a  watering-place,  a  refuge  from 
summer  heats,  it  had  also,  were  the  measure 
considerably  stretched,  possibilities  of  hiberna 
tion.  We  could,  under  stress,  brave  there  the 
period  from  November  to  June;  and  it  was  to  be 
under  stress  not  to  know  what  else  to  do.  That 
was  the  pinch  to  which  Europe  reduced  you; 
insidiously,  fatally  disconnected,  you  could  but 
make  the  best,  as  a  penalty,  of  the  one  marked 
point  of  reattachment.  The  philosophy  of  all 
of  which  was  that  to  confess  to  disconnection  was 
to  confess  by  the  same  stroke  to  leisure  —  which 


68    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

involved  also  an  admission,  however  rueful  at 
once  and  deprecatory,  of  what  might  still  at  that 
time  pass  in  our  unregenerate  country  for  some 
thing  in  the  nature  of  "means."  You  had  had 
the  means,  that  is,  to  become,  so  awkwardly, 
detached  —  for  you  might  then  do  that  cheaply; 
but  the  whole  basis  of  the  winter  life  there,  of 
that  spare  semblance  of  the  Brighton  life,  the 
Folkestone  life,  the  Bath  or  the  Cheltenham  or 
the  Leamington  life,  was  that  your  occupation  or 
avocation  should  be  vague  enough;  or  that  you 
shouldn't  in  other  words  be,  like  everyone  you 
might  know  save  a  dozen  or  so  at  the  most,  in 
business.  I  remember  well  how  when  we  were 
all  young  together  we  had,  under  pressure  of  the 
American  ideal  in  that  matter,  then  so  rigid,  felt 
it  tasteless  and  even  humiliating  that  the  head 
of  our  little  family  was  not  in  business,  and 
that  even  among  our  relatives  on  each  side  we 
couldn't  so  much  as  name  proudly  anyone  who 
was  —  with  the  sole  exception  of  our  maternal 
uncle  Robertson  Walsh,  who  looked,  ever  so 
benevolently,  after  our  father's  "affairs,"  happily 
for  us.  Such  had  never  been  the  case  with  the 
father  of  any  boy  of  our  acquaintance;  the 
business  in  which  the  boy's  father  gloriously  was 
stood  forth  inveterately  as  the  very  first  note 
of  our  comrade's  impress! veness.  We  had  no 
note  of  that  sort  to  produce,  and  I  perfectly 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    69 

recover  the  effect  of  my  own  repeated  appeal  to 
our  parent  for  some  presentable  account  of  him 
that  would  prove  us  respectable.  Business  alone 
was  respectable  —  if  one  meant  by  it,  that  is,  the 
calling  of  a  lawyer,  a  doctor  or  a  minister  (we 
never  spoke  of  clergymen)  as  well;  I  think  that 
if  we  had  had  the  Pope  among  us  we  should  have 
supposed  the  Pope  in  business,  just  as  I  remember 
my  friend  Simpson's  telling  me  crushingly,  at 
one  of  our  New  York  schools,  on  my  hanging 
back  with  the  fatal  truth  about  our  credentials, 
that  the  author  of  his  being  (we  spoke  no  more  of 
"governors"  than  we  did  of  "parsons")  was  in 
the  business  of  a  stevedore.  That  struck  me  as 
a  great  card  to  play  -  -  the  word  was  fine  and 
mysterious;  so  that  "What  shall  we  tell  them 
you  are,  don't  you  see?"  could  but  become  on 
our  lips  at  home  a  more  constant  appeal.  It 
seemed  wantonly  to  be  prompted  for  our  father, 
and  indeed  greatly  to  amuse  him,  that  he  should 
put  us  off  with  strange  unheard-of  attributions, 
such  as  would  have  made  us  ridiculous  in  our 
special  circles;  his  "Say  I'm  a  philosopher,  say 
I'm  a  seeker  for  truth,  say  I'm  a  lover  of  my  kind, 
say  I'm  an  author  of  books  if  you  like;  or,  best 
of  all,  just  say  I'm  a  Student,"  saw  us  so  very 
little  further.  Abject  it  certainly  appeared  to 
be  reduced  to  the  "student"  plea;  and  I  must 
have  lacked  even  the  confidence  of  my  brother 


70    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

Bob,  who,  challenged,  in  my  hearing  and  the 
usual  way,  was  ready  not  only  with  the  fact  that 
our  parent  "wrote,"  but  with  the  further  fact 
that  he  had  written  Lectures  and  Miscellanies 
James.  I  think  that  when  we  settled  awhile  at 
Newport  there  was  no  one  there  who  had  written 
but  Mr.  Henry  T.  Tuckerman,  a  genial  and 
graceful  poet  of  the  Artless  Age,  as  it  might  still 
be  called  in  spite  of  Poe  and  Hawthorne  and 
Longfellow  and  Lowell,  the  most  characteristic 
works  of  the  first  and  the  two  last  of  whom  had 
already  appeared;  especially  as  those  most 
characteristic  of  Mr.  Tuckerman  referred  them 
selves  to  a  past  sufficiently  ample  to  have  left 
that  gentleman  with  a  certain  deafness  and  a 
glossy  wig  and  a  portly  presence  and  the  reputa 
tion,  positively,  of  the  most  practised  and  desired 
of  diners-out.  He  was  to  be  recognised  at  once 
as  a  social  value  on  a  scene  not  under  that  rubric 
densely  peopled;  he  constituted  indeed  such  a 
note  as  would  help  to  keep  others  of  the  vague 
definability  in  countenance.  Clearly  indeed  it 
might  happen  that  an  association  of  vaguenesses 
would  arrive  in  time,  by  fondly  cleaving  together, 
at  the  semblance  of  a  common  identity;  the 
nature  of  the  case  then  demanding,  however, 
that  they  should  be  methodically  vague,  take 
their  stand  on  it  and  work  it  for  all  it  was  worth. 
That  in  truth  was  made  easy  by  the  fact  that 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    71 

what  I  have  called  our  common  disconnectedness 
positively  projected  and  proclaimed  a  void; 
disconnected  from  business  we  could  only  be 
connected  with  the  negation  of  it,  which  had  as 
yet  no  affirmative,  no  figurative  side.  This 
probably  would  come;  figures,  in  the  void, 
would  one  by  one  spring  up;  but  what  would 
be  thus  required  for  them  was  that  the  void 
should  be  ample  and,  as  it  were,  established. 
Not  to  be  afraid  of  it  they  would  have  to  feel  it 
clear  of  everything  and  everyone  they  knew  in 
the  air  actually  peopled. 

William  Hunt,  for  that  matter,  was  already  a 
figure  unmistakable,  superficially  speaking  un 
surpassable,  just  as  John  La  Farge,  already 
mentioned,  was  so  soon  to  prove  to  be.  They 
were  only  two  indeed,  but  they  argued  the  pos 
sibility;  and  so  the  great  thing,  as  I  say,  was 
that,  to  stand  out,  they  should  have  margin  and 
light.  We  couldn't  all  be  figures  —  on  a  mere 
margin,  the  margin  of  business,  and  in  the  light 
of  the  general  wonder  of  our  being  anything, 
anything  there;  but  we  could  at  least  understand 
the  situation  and  cultivate  the  possibilities,  watch 
and  protect  the  germs.  This  consciousness,  this 
aim  or  ideal,  had  after  all  its  own  intensity  —  it 
burned  with  a  pure  flame:  there  is  a  special  joy, 
clearly,  in  the  hopeful  conversion  of  the  desert 
into  the  garden,  of  thinness  into  thickness,  a  joy 


72    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

to  which  the  conversion  of  the  thick  into  the  mere 
dense,  of  the  free  into  the  rank  or  the  close, 
perhaps  gives  no  clue.  The  great  need  that 
Newport  met  was  that  of  a  basis  of  reconciliation 
to  "America"  when  the  habit,  the  taking  for 
granted,  of  America  had  been  broken  or  inter 
mitted:  it  would  be  hard  to  say  of  what  subtle 
secret  or  magic  the  place  was  possessed  toward 
this  end,  and  by  a  common  instinct,  I  think,  we 
didn't  attempt  to  formulate  it  —  we  let  it  alone, 
only  looking  at  each  other  hard,  only  moving 
gently,  on  the  brave  hypothesis,  only  in  fine 
deprecating  too  rude  and  impatient,  too  pre 
cipitate  a  doubt  of  the  spell  that  perhaps  might 
work  if  we  waited  and  prayed.  We  did  wait 
and  pray,  accordingly,  scantly-served  though 
the  board  we  might  often  have  felt  we  had  sat 
down  to,  and  there  was  a  fair  company  of  us  to 
do  so,  friendliest  among  whom  to  our  particular 
effort  was  my  father's  excellent  friend  of  many 
years  Edmund  Tweedy,  already  named  in  pages 
preparatory  to  these  and  who,  with  his  admirable 
wife,  presented  himself  as  our  main  introducer  and 
initiator.  He  had  married,  while  we  were  all 
young  in  New  York  together,  a  manner  of  Albany 
cousin,  Mary  Temple  the  elder,  aunt  of  the 
younger,1  and  had  by  this  time  "been  through" 
more  than  anything,  more  than  everything,  of 

i  A  Small  Boy  and  Others,  1913. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    73 

which  there  could  be  question  for  ourselves. 
The  pair  had  on  their  marriage  gone  at  once  to 
Europe  to  live,  had  put  in  several  years  of  Italy 
and  yet  had  at  last,  particular  reasons  operating, 
returned  to  their  native,  that  is  to  sterner,  reali 
ties;  those  as  to  which  it  was  our  general  theory, 
of  so  touching  a  candour  as  I  look  back  to  it,  that 
they  offered  themselves  at  Newport  in  a  muffling 
mitigating  air.  The  air,  material,  moral,  social, 
was  in  fact  clear  and  clean  to  a  degree  that  might 
well  have  left  us  but  dazed  at  the  circumjacent 
blankness;  yet  as  to  that  I  hasten  to  add  too  that 
the  blowing  out  of  our  bubble,  the  planting  of 
our  garden,  the  correction  of  our  thinness,  the 
discovery,  under  stress,  of  such  scraps  of  colour 
and  conversation,  such  saving  echoes  and  re 
deeming  references  as  might  lurk  for  us  in  each 
other,  all  formed  in  themselves  an  active,  and 
might  at  last  even  grow  to  suggest  an  absolutely 
bustling,  process. 

I  come  back  with  a  real  tenderness  of  memory 
for  instance  to  that  felicity  of  the  personal,  the 
social,  the  "literary  and  artistic,"  almost  really 
the  romantic,  identity  responding,  after  a  fashion 
quite  to  bring  tears  to  the  eyes,  in  proportion  as 
it  might  have  seemed  to  feel  by  some  divine 
insufflation  what  it  practically  could  stand  for. 
What  should  one  call  this  but  the  brave  triumph 
of  values  conscious  of  having  to  be  almost 


74    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

missionary?  There  were  many  such  that  in 
"Europe"  hadn't  had  to  be  missionary  at  all; 
in  Europe,  as  it  were,  one  hadn't  —  comparatively 
-  seen,  if  not  the  forest  for  the  trees,  then  the 
trees  for  the  forest;  whereas  on  this  other  great 
vacuous  level  every  single  stem  seemed  to  enjoy 
for  its  distinction  quite  the  totality  of  the  day 
light  and  to  rise  into  the  air  with  a  gladness 
that  was  itself  a  grace.  Of  some  of  the  personal 
importances  that  acted  in  that  way  I  should  with 
easier  occasion  have  more  to  say  -  - 1  shall  as  it  is 
have  something;  but  there  could  perhaps  be 
no  better  sample  of  the  effect  of  sharpness  with 
which  the  forces  of  culture  might  emerge  than, 
say,  the  fairly  golden  glow  of  romance  investing 
the  mere  act  of  perusal  of  the  Revue  des  Deux 
Mondes.  There  was  the  charm  —  though  I  grant 
of  course  that  I  speak  here  all  for  myself,  con 
stitutionally  and,  face  to  face  with  myself,  quite 
shamelessly  an  inquirer,  a  hunter,  for  charm - 
that  whereas  the  spell  cast  had  more  or  less 
inevitable  limits  in  the  world  to  which  such  a 
quality  as  the  best  things  of  the  Revue,  such  a 
performance  of  the  intellectual  and  expressional 
engagement  as  these  suggested,  was  native  and 
was  thereby  relative  to  other  generally  like 
phenomena,  so  it  represented  among  us,  where  it 
had  to  take  upon  itself  what  I  have  already 
alluded  to  as  all  the  work,  far  more  than  its  face 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    75 

value.  Few  of  the  forces  about  us  reached  as 
yet  the  level  of  representation  (even  if  here  and 
there  some  might  have  been  felt  as  trying  for  it) ; 
and  this  made  all  the  difference.  Anything 
suggestive  or  significant,  anything  promising  or 
interesting,  anything  in  the  least  finely  charming 
above  all,  immensely  counted,  claimed  tendance 
and  protection,  almost  claimed,  or  at  any  rate 
enjoyed,  worship;  as  for  that  matter  anything 
finely  charming  does,  quite  rightly,  anywhere. 
But  our  care,  our  privilege,  on  occasion  our  felt 
felicity,  was  to  foster  every  symptom  and  breathe 
encouragement  to  every  success;  to  hang  over  the 
tenderest  shoots  that  betrayed  the  principle  of 
growth  —  or  in  other  words  to  read  devoutly 
into  everything,  and  as  straight  as  possible,  the 
very  fullest  meaning  we  might  hope  it  would  learn 
to  have.  So  at  least  quite  at  first  —  and  so  again 
very  considerably  after  the  large  interval  and 
grim  intermission  represented  by  the  War;  during 
which  interest  and  quality,  to  say  nothing  of 
quantity,  at  the  highest  pitch,  ceased  in  any 
degree  to  fail  us,  and  what  might  be  "read  into" 
almost  any  aspect  without  exception  paled  in  the 
light  of  what  was  inevitably  read  out  from  it. 
It  must  be  added  at  the  same  time  that  with  its 
long  duration  the  War  fell  into  its  place  as  part 
of  life  at  large,  and  that  when  it  was  over  various 
other  things  still  than  the  love  of  peace  were 
found  to  have  grown. 


76    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

Immediately,  at  any  rate,  the  Albany  cousins, 
or  a  particular  group  of  them,  began  again  to  be 
intensely  in  question  for  us;  coloured  in  due 
course  with  reflections  of  the  War  as  their  lives, 
not  less  than  our  own,  were  to  become  —  and 
coloured  as  well  too,  for  all  sorts  of  notation  and 
appreciation,  from  irrepressible  private  founts. 
Mrs.  Edmund  Tweedy,  bereft  of  her  own  young 
children,  had  at  the  time  I  speak  of  opened  her 
existence,  with  the  amplest  hospitality,  to  her 
four  orphaned  nieces,  who  were  also  our  father's 
and  among  whom  the  second  in  age,  Mary  Temple 
the  younger,  about  in  her  seventeenth  year  when 
she  thus  renewed  her  appearance  to  our  view, 
shone  with  vividest  lustre,  an  essence  that  pre 
serves  her  still,  more  than  half  a  century  from 
the  date  of  her  death,  in  a  memory  or  two  where 
many  a  relic  once  sacred  has  comparatively 
yielded  to  time.  Most  of  those  who  knew  and 
loved,  I  was  going  to  say  adored,  her  have  also 
yielded  —  which  is  a  reason  the  more  why  thus 
much  of  her,  faint  echo  from  too  far  off  though  it 
prove,  should  be  tenderly  saved.  If  I  have  spoken 
of  the  elements  and  presences  round  about  us 
that  "counted,"  Mary  Temple  was  to  count,  and 
in  more  lives  than  can  now  be  named,  to  an 
extraordinary  degree;  count  as  a  young  and 
shining  apparition,  a  creature  who  owed  to  the 
charm  of  her  every  aspect  (her  aspects  were  so 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    77 

many!)  and  the  originality,  vivacity,  audacity, 
generosity,  of  her  spirit,  an  indescribable  grace 
and  weight  —  if  one  might  impute  weight  to  a 
being  so  imponderable  in  common  scales.  What 
ever  other  values  on  our  scene  might,  as  I  have 
hinted,  appear  to  fail,  she  was  one  of  the  first 
order,  in  the  sense  of  the  immediacy  of  the 
impression  she  produced,  and  produced  alto 
gether  as  by  the  play  of  her  own  light  spontaneity 
and  curiosity  -  -  not,  that  is,  as  through  a  sense  of 
such  a  pressure  and  such  a  motive,  or  through  a 
care  for  them,  in  others.  "Natural"  to  an  effect 
of  perfect  felicity  that  we  were  never  to  see  sur 
passed  is  what  I  have  already  praised  all  the 
Albany  cousinage  of  those  years  for  being;  but 
in  none  of  the  company  was  the  note  so  clear 
as  in  this  rarest,  though  at  the  same  time 
symptomatically  or  ominously  palest,  flower  of  the 
stem;  who  was  natural  at  more  points  and  about 
more  things,  with  a  greater  range  of  freedom  and 
ease  and  reach  of  horizon  than  any  of  the  others 
dreamed  of.  They  had  that  way,  delightfully, 
with  the  small,  after  all,  and  the  common  matters 
-while  she  had  it  with  those  too,  but  with  the 
great  and  rare  ones  over  and  above;  so  that  she 
was  to  remain  for  us  the  very  figure  and  image 
of  a  felt  interest  in  life,  an  interest  as  magnani 
mously  far-spread,  or  as  familiarly  and  exquisitely 
fixed,  as  her  splendid  shifting  sensibility,  moral, 


78    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

personal,  nervous,  and  having  at  once  such  noble 
flights  and  such  touchingly  discouraged  drops, 
such  graces  of  indifference  and  inconsequence, 
might  at  any  moment  determine.  She  was  really 
to  remain,  for  our  appreciation,  the  supreme  case 
of  a  taste  for  life  as  life,  as  personal  living;  of  an 
endlessly  active  and  yet  somehow  a  careless, 
an  illusionless,  a  sublimely  forewarned  curiosity 
about  it:  something  that  made  her,  slim  and  fair 
and  quick,  all  straightness  and  charming  tossed 
head,  with  long  light  and  yet  almost  sliding  steps 
and  a  large  light  postponing,  renouncing  laugh, 
the  very  muse  or  amateur  priestess  of  rash  specula 
tion.  To  express  her  in  the  mere  terms  of  her 
restless  young  mind,  one  felt  from  the  first,  was 
to  place  her,  by  a  perversion  of  the  truth,  under 
the  shadow  of  female  "earnestness"  -for  which 
she  was  much  too  unliteral  and  too  ironic;  so 
that,  superlatively  personal  and  yet  as  inde 
pendent,  as  "off"  into  higher  spaces,  at  a  touch, 
as  all  the  breadth  of  her  sympathy  and  her 
courage  could  send  her,  she  made  it  impossible 
to  say  whether  she  was  just  the  most  moving  of 
maidens  or  a  disengaged  and  dancing  flame  of 
thought.  No  one  to  come  after  her  could  easily 
seem  to  show  either  a  quick  inward  life  or  a  brave, 
or  even  a  bright,  outward,  either  a  consistent 
contempt  for  social  squalors  or  a  very  marked 
genius  for  moral  reactions.  She  had  in  her  brief 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    79 

passage  the  enthusiasm  of  humanity -- more, 
assuredly,  than  any  charming  girl  who  ever 
circled,  and  would  fain  have  continued  to  circle, 
round  a  ballroom.  This  kept  her  indeed  for  a 
time  more  interested  in  the  individual,  the 
immediate  human,  than  in  the  race  or  the  social 
order  at  large;  but  that,  on  the  other  hand,  made 
her  ever  so  restlessly,  or  quite  inappeasably, 
"psychologic."  The  psychology  of  others,  in 
her  shadow  -  -  I  mean  their  general  resort  to  it  — 
could  only  for  a  long  time  seem  weak  and  flat 
and  dim,  above  all  not  at  all  amusing.  She 
burned  herself  out;  she  died  at  twenty -four. 

At  the  risk  perhaps  of  appearing  to  make  my 
own  scant  adventure  the  pivot  of  that  early 
Newport  phase  I  find  my  reference  to  William 
Hunt  and  his  truly  fertilising  action  on  our 
common  life  much  conditioned  by  the  fact  that, 
since  W.  J.,  for  the  first  six  months  or  so  after 
our  return,  daily  and  devotedly  haunted  his 
studio,  I  myself  did  no  less,  for  a  shorter  stretch, 
under  the  irresistible  contagion.  The  clearness 
of  the  whole  passage  for  me,  the  clearest  impres 
sion,  above  all,  of  the  vivid  and  whimsical  master, 
an  inspirer,  during  a  period  that  began  a  little 
later  on,  of  numberless  devotions  and  loyalties, 
is  what  this  fond  memory  of  my  permitted  contact 
and  endeavour  still  has  to  give  me.  Pupils  at 
that  time  didn't  flock  to  his  gates  —  though  they 


80    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

were  to  do  so  in  Boston,  during  years,  later  on; 
an  earnest  lady  or  two,  Boston  precursors, 
hovered  and  flitted,  but  I  remember  for  the  rest 
(and  I  speak  of  a  short  period)  no  thorough 
going  eleves  save  John  La  Farge  and  my  brother. 
I  remember,  for  that  matter,  sitting  quite  in 
solitude  in  one  of  the  grey  cool  rooms  of  the 
studio,  which  thus  comes  back  to  me  as  having 
several,  and  thinking  that  I  really  might  get  to 
copy  casts  rather  well,  and  might  in  particular 
see  myself  congratulated  on  my  sympathetic 
rendering  of  the  sublime  uplifted  face  of  Michael 
Angelo's  "Captive"  in  the  Louvre.  I  sat  over 
this  effort  and  a  few  others  for  long  quiet  hours, 
and  seem  to  feel  myself  again  aware,  just  to  that 
tune,  of  how  happy  I  ought  to  be.  No  one 
disturbed  me;  the  earnest  workers  were  else 
where;  I  had  a  chamber  of  the  temple  all  to 
myself,  with  immortal  forms  and  curves,  with 
shadows  beautiful  and  right,  waiting  there  on 
blank-eyed  faces  for  me  to  prove  myself  not 
helpless;  and  with  two  or  three  of  Hunt's  own 
fine  things,  examples  of  his  work  in  France, 
transporting  me  at  once  and  defying.  I  believed 
them  great  productions  —  thought  in  especial 
endless  good  of  the  large  canvas  of  the  girl  with 
her  back  presented  while  she  fills  her  bucket  at 
the  spout  in  the  wall,  against  which  she  leans  with 
a  tension  of  young  muscle,  a  general  expression 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    81 

of  back,  beneath  her  dress,  and  with  the  pressure 
of  her  raised  and  extended  bare  arm  and  flattened 
hand:  this,  to  my  imagination,  could  only  be 
come  the  prize  of  some  famous  collection,  the 
light  of  some  museum,  for  all  the  odd  circum 
stance  that  it  was  company  just  then  for  muddled 
me  and  for  the  queer  figures  projected  by  my 
crayon.  Frankly,  intensely  -  -  that  was  the  great 
thing  —  these  were  hours  of  Art,  art  definitely 
named,  looking  me  full  in  the  face  and  accepting 
my  stare  in  return  —  no  longer  a  tacit  implication 
or  a  shy  subterfuge,  but  a  flagrant  unattenuated 
aim.  I  had  somehow  come  into  the  temple  by 
the  back  door,  the  porte  d'honneur  opened  on 
another  side,  and  I  could  never  have  believed 
much  at  best  in  the  length  of  my  stay;  but  I 
was  there,  day  by  day,  as  much  as  any  one  had 
ever  been,  and  with  a  sense  of  what  it  "meant" 
to  be  there  that  the  most  accredited  of  pupils 
couldn't  have  surpassed;  so  that  the  situation 
to  this  extent  really  hummed  with  promise.  I 
fail,  I  confess,  to  reconstitute  the  relation  borne 
by  my  privilege  to  that  of  tuition  "in  the  higher 
branches,"  to  which  it  was  quite  time  I  should 
have  mounted,  enjoyed  at  the  hands  of  the 
Reverend  William  C.  Leverett,  curate  to  the 
then  "rector,"  Doctor  Mercer,  of  that  fine  old 
high-spired  Trinity  Church  in  which  had  throbbed, 
from  long  before  the  Revolution  as  they  used  to 


m    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

say,  the  proud  episcopal  heart  of  Newport;  and 
feel  indeed  that  I  must  pretty  well  have  shaken 
off,  as  a  proved  absurd  predicament,  all  sub 
mission  to  my  dilemma:  all  submission  of  the 
mind,  that  is,  for  if  my  share  of  Mr.  Leverett's 
attention  was  less  stinted  than  my  share  of 
William  Hunt's  (and  neither  had  much  duration) 
it  failed  to  give  me  the  impression  that  anything 
worth  naming  had  opened  out  to  me,  whereas 
in  the  studio  I  was  at  the  threshold  of  a  world. 

It  became  itself  indeed  on  the  spot  a  rounded 
satisfying  world,  the  place  did;  enclosed  within 
the  grounds,  as  we  then  regarded  them,  of  the 
master's  house,  circled  about  with  numerous 
trees,  as  we  then  counted  them,  and  representing 
a  more  direct  exclusion  of  vulgar  sounds,  false 
notes  and  harsh  reminders  than  I  had  ever  known. 
I  fail  in  the  least  to  make  out  where  the  real  work 
of  the  studio  went  forward;  it  took  somewhere 
else  its  earnest  course,  and  our  separation  —  mine 
from  the  real  workers,  my  indulged  yet  ignored 
state  —  kept  me  somehow  the  safer,  as  if  I  had 
taken  some  mild  and  quite  harmless  drug  through 
which  external  rubs  would  reach  me  from  a 
distance,  but  which  left  my  own  rubbing  power, 
not  to  say  my  own  smearing  or  smutching,  quite 
free.  Into  the  world  so  beautifully  valid  the 
master  would  occasionally  walk,  inquiring  as  to 
what  I  had  done  or  would  do,  but  bearing  on 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    83 

the  question  with  an  easy  lightness,  a  friendliness 
of  tact,  a  neglect  of  conclusion,  which  it  touches 
me  still  to  remember.  It  was  impossible  to  me 
at  that  time  not  so  to  admire  him  that  his  just 
being  to  such  an  extent,  as  from  top  to  toe  and 
in  every  accent  and  motion,  the  living  and  com 
municating  Artist,  made  the  issue,  with  his 
presence,  quite  cease  to  be  of  how  one  got  on  or 
fell  short,  and  become  instead  a  mere  self -sacrificing 
vision  of  the  picturesque  itself,  the  constituted 
picturesque  or  treated  "subject,"  in  efficient 
figure,  personal  form,  vivid  human  style.  I  then 
felt  the  man  the  great  mystery  could  mark  with 
its  stamp,  when  wishing  the  mark  unmistakable, 
teach  me  just  .in  himself  the  most  and  best  about 
any  art  that  I  should  come  to  find  benignantly 
concerned  with  me,  for  moments  however  smil 
ingly  scant.  William  Hunt,  all  muscular  spare- 
ness  and  brownness  and  absence  of  waste,  all 
flagrant  physiognomy,  brave  bony  arch  of  hand 
some  nose,  upwardness  of  strong  eyebrow  and 
glare,  almost,  of  eyes  that  both  recognised  and 
wondered,  strained  eyes  that  played  over  ques 
tions  as  if  they  were  objects  and  objects  as  if 
they  were  questions,  might  have  stood,  to  the 
life,  for  Don  Quixote,  if  we  could  associate  with 
that  hero  a  far-spreading  beard  already  a  little 
grizzled,  a  manner  and  range  of  gesture  and  broken 
form  of  discourse  that  was  like  a  restless  reference 


84    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

to  a  palette  and  that  seemed  to  take  for  granted, 
all  about,  canvases  and  models  and  charming, 
amusing  things,  the  "tremendously  interesting" 
in  the  seen  bit  or  caught  moment,  and  the  general 
unsayability,  in  comparison,  of  anything  else. 
He  never  would  have  perched,  it  must  be  added, 
on  Rosinante  —  he  was  fonder  of  horses  even  than 
of  the  method  of  Couture,  and  though  with  a 
shade  of  resemblance,  as  all  simple  and  imagina 
tive  men  have,  to  the  knight  of  La  Mancha,  he 
least  suggested  that  analogy  as  he  passed  in  a 
spinning  buggy,  his  beard  flying,  behind  a 
favourite  trotter.  But  what  he  perhaps  most 
puts  before  me  to-day  is  the  grim  truth  of  the 
merciless  manner  in  which  a  living  and  hurrying 
public  educates  itself,  making  and  devouring 
in  a  day  reputations  and  values  which  represent 
something  of  the  belief  in  it  that  it  has  had  in 
them,  but  at  the  memory  of  which  we  wince, 
almost  to  horror,  as  at  the  legend  of  victims  who 
have  been  buried  alive.  Oh  the  cold  grey 
luminaries  hung  about  in  odd  corners  and  back 
passages,  and  that  we  have  known  shining  and 
warm!  They  serve  at  the  most  now  as  beacons 
warning  any  step  not  to  come  that  way,  whatever 
it  does;  the  various  attested  ways  it  may  not 
with  felicity  come  growing  thus  all  the  while  in 
number. 

John  La  Farge  became  at  once,  in  breaking  on 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    85 

our  view,  quite  the  most  interesting  person  we 
knew,  and  for  a  time  remained  so;  he  became 
a  great  many  other  things  beside  —  a  character, 
above  all,  if  there  ever  was  one;  but  he  opened 
up  to  us,  though  perhaps  to  me  in  particular, 
who  could  absorb  all  that  was  given  me  on  those 
suggestive  lines,  prospects  and  possibilities  that 
made  the  future  flush  and  swarm.  His  foreign- 
ness,  which  seemed  great  at  that  time,  had  gained 
a  sharper  accent  from  a  long  stay  made  in  France, 
where  both  on  his  father's  and  his  mother's  side 
he  had  relations,  and  had  found,  to  our  hovering 
envy,  all  sorts  of  charming  occasions.  He  had 
spent  much  time  in  Brittany,  among  kindred  the 
most  romantically  interesting,  people  and  places 
whose  very  names,  the  De  Nanteuils  of  Saint-Pol- 
de-Leon,  I  seem  to  remember  for  instance,  cast 
a  spell  across  comparatively  blank  Newport 
sands;  he  had  brought  home  with  him  innumer 
able  water-colour  sketches,  Breton  peasants, 
costumes,  interiors,  bits  of  villages  and  land 
scape;  and  I  supposed  him  to  have  had  on  such 
ground  the  most  delightful  adventure  in  the 
world.  How  was  one  not  to  suppose  it  at  a  time 
when  the  best  of  one's  education,  such  as  that  was, 
had  begun  to  proceed  almost  altogether  by  the  aid 
of  the  Revue  des  Deux  Mondes,  a  periodical  that 
supplied  to  us  then  and  for  several  years  after 
(or  again  I  can  but  speak  for  myself)  all  that  was 


86    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

finest  in  the  furniture  and  the  fittings  of  romance? 
Those  beginnings  of  Newport  were  our  first 
contact  with  New  England  —  a  New  England 
already  comparatively  subdued  and  sophisticated, 
a  Samson  shorn  of  his  strength  by  the  shears  of 
the  Southern,  and  more  particularly  of  the  New 
York,  Delilah;  the  result  of  which,  still  speaking 
for  myself,  was  a  prompt  yearning  and  reaching 
out,  on  the  part  of  the  spirit,  for  some  corrective 
or  antidote  to  whatever  it  was  that  might  be 
going,  in  the  season  to  come,  least  charmingly  or 
informingly  or  inspiringly  to  press  upon  us.  I 
well  recall  my  small  anxious  foresight  as  to  a 
required,  an  indispensable  provision  against  either 
assault  or  dearth,  as  if  the  question  might  be  of 
standing  an  indefinite  siege;  and  how  a  certain 
particular  capacious  closet  in  a  house  we  were 
presently  to  occupy  took  on  to  my  fond  fancy 
the  likeness  at  once  of  a  store  of  edibles,  both 
substantial  and  succulent,  and  of  a  hoard  of 
ammunition  for  the  defence  of  any  breach  —  the 
Revue  accumulating  on  its  shelves  at  last  in 
serried  rows  and  really  building  up  beneath  us 
with  its  slender  firm  salmon-coloured  blocks  an 
alternative  sphere  of  habitation.  There  will  be 
more  to  say  of  this,  bristling  or  rather  flowering 
with  precious  particulars,  if  I  stray  so  far;  but 
the  point  for  the  moment  was  that  one  would 
have  pushed  into  that  world  of  the  closet,  one 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    87 

would  have  wandered  or  stumbled  about  in  it 
quite  alone  if  it  hadn't  been  that  La  Farge  was 
somehow  always  in  it  with  us.  That  was  in  those 
years  his  admirable  function  and  touch  —  that  he 
affected  me  as  knowing  his  way  there  as  absolutely 
no  one  else  did,  and  even  as  having  risen  of  a 
sudden  before  us  to  bear  us  this  quickening 
company.  Nobody  else,  not  another  creature, 
was  free  of  it  to  that  tune;  the  whole  mid-century 
New  England  —  as  a  rough  expression  of  what  the 
general  consciousness  most  signified  —  was  utterly 
out  of  it;  which  made,  you  see,  a  most  unequal 
division  of  our  little  working,  or  our  totally 
cogitative,  universe  into  the  wondrous  esoteric 
quarter  peopled  just  by  us  and  our  friend  and 
our  common  references,  and  the  vast  remainder 
of  the  public  at  large,  the  public  of  the  innumer 
ably  uninitiated  even  when  apparently  of  the 
most  associated. 

All  of  which  is  but  a  manner  of  expressing  the 
intensity,  as  I  felt  it,  of  our  Franco-American,  our 
most  completely  accomplished  friend's  presence 
among  us.  Out  of  the  safe  rich  home  of  the 
Revue,  which  opened  away  into  the  vastness  of 
visions,  he  practically  stepped,  and  into  it,  with 
all  his  ease,  he  mysteriously  returned  again:  he 
came  nearer  to  being  what  might  have  been  meant 
concretely  throughout  it  all  —  though  meant  most 
of  course  in  its  full-charged  stream  of  fiction  — 


88    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

than  any  other  visiting  figure.  The  stream  of 
fiction  was  so  constant  an  appeal  to  the  charmed, 
by  which  I  mean  of  course  the  predisposed,  mind 
that  it  fairly  seemed  at  moments  to  overflow 
its  banks  and  take  to  its  bosom  any  recognised, 
any  congruous  creature  or  thing  that  might 
happen  to  be  within  reach.  La  Farge  was  of 
the  type  —  the  "European,"  and  this  gave  him 
an  authority  for  me  that  it  verily  took  the  length 
of  years  to  undermine;  so  that  as  the  sense  of 
those  first  of  them  in  especial  comes  back  to  me 
I  find  it  difficult,  even  under  the  appeal  to  me  of 
the  attempt,  to  tell  how  he  was  to  count  in  my 
earliest  culture.  If  culture,  as  I  hold,  is  a  matter 
of  attitude  quite  as  much  as  of  opportunity,  and 
of  the  form  and  substance  of  the  vessel  carried 
to  the  fountain  no  less  than  of  the  water-supply 
itself,  there  couldn't  have  been  better  conditions 
for  its  operating  drop  by  drop.  It  operates  ever 
much  more,  I  think,  by  one's  getting  whatever 
there  may  happen  to  be  out  for  one's  use  than 
by  its  conforming  to  any  abstract  standard  of 
quantity  or  lustre.  It  may  work,  as  between 
dispenser  and  subject,  in  so  incalculably  personal 
a  manner  that  no  chemical  analysis  shall  recover 
it,  no  common  estimate  of  forces  or  amounts 
find  itself  in  the  least  apply.  The  case  was  that 
La  Farge  swam  into  our  ingenuous  ken  as  the 
figure  of  figures,  and  that  such  an  agent,  on  a 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    89 

stage  so  unpeopled  and  before  a  scene  so  un- 
painted,  became  salient  and  vivid  almost  in 
spite  of  itself.  The  figure  was  at  a  premium,  and 
fit  for  any  glass  case  that  its  vivacity  should  allow 
to  enclose  it  —  wherein  it  might  be  surrounded 
by  wondering,  admiring  and  often  quite  in 
evitably  misconceiving  observers.  It  was  not 
that  these  too  weren't  agents  in  their  way,  agents 
in  some  especial  good  cause  without  the  further 
ance  of  which  we  never  should  have  done  at  all; 
but  they  were  by  that  very  fact  specialised  and 
stiffened,  committed  to  their  one  attitude,  the 
immediately  profitable,  and  incapable  of  that 
play  of  gesture  in  which  we  recognise  representa 
tion.  A  representative,  a  rounded  figure,  how 
ever,  is  as  to  none  of  its  relations  definable 
or  announceable  beforehand;  we  only  know  it, 
for  good  or  for  ill,  but  with  something  of  the 
throb  of  elation  always,  when  we  see  it,  and  then 
it  in  general  sufficiently  accounts  for  itself.  We 
often  for  that  matter  insist  on  its  being  a  figure, 
we  positively  make  it  one,  in  proportion  as  we 
seem  to  need  it  —  or  as  in  other  words  we  too 
acutely  miss  the  active  virtue  of  representation. 
It  takes  some  extraordinary  set  of  circumstances 
or  time  of  life,  I  think,  either  to  beguile  or  to 
hustle  us  into  indifference  to  some  larger  felt 
extension  roundabout  us  of  "the  world"  -a 
sphere  the  confines  of  which  move  on  even  as 


90    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

we  ourselves  move  and  which  is  always  there, 
just  beyond  us,  to  twit  us  with  the  more  it  should 
have  to  show  if  we  were  a  little  more  "of"  it. 
Sufficiency  shuts  us  in  but  till  the  man  of  the 
world  —  never  prefigured,  as  I  say,  only  welcomed 
on  the  spot  —  appears;  when  we  see  at  once  how 
much  we  have  wanted  him.  When  we  fail  of  that 
acknowledgment,  that  sense  as  of  a  tension,  an 
anxiety  or  an  indigence  relieved,  it  is  of  course 
but  that  the  extraordinary  set  of  circumstances, 
or  above  all  the  extraordinary  time  of  life  I  speak 
of,  has  indeed  intervened. 

It  was  as  a  man  of  the  world  that,  for  all  his 
youth,  La  Farge  rose  or,  still  better,  bowed, 
before  us,  his  inclinations  of  obeisance,  his  con 
siderations  of  address  being  such  as  we  had  never 
seen  and  now  almost  publicly  celebrated.  This 
was  what  most  immediately  and  most  iridescently 
showed,  the  truth  being  all  the  while  that  the 
character  took  on  in  him  particular  values  without 
which  it  often  enough,  though  then  much  more 
grossly,  flourishes.  It  was  by  these  enrichments 
of  curiosity,  of  taste  and  genius,  that  he  became 
the  personality,  as  we  nowadays  say,  that  I  have 
noted  —  the  full  freshness  of  all  of  which  was  to 
play  but  through  his  younger  time,  or  at  least 
through  our  younger  apprehension.  He  was  so 
"intellectual"  -that  was  the  flower;  it  crowned 
his  being  personally  so  finished  and  launched. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    91 

The  wealth  of  his  cultivation,  the  variety  of 
his  initiations,  the  inveteracy  of  his  forms,  the 
degree  of  his  empressement  (this  in  itself,  I  re 
peat,  a  revelation)  made  him,  with  those  ele 
ments  of  the  dandy  and  the  cavalier  to  which 
he  struck  us  as  so  picturesquely  sacrificing,  a 
cluster  of  bright  promises,  a  rare  original  and, 
though  not  at  all  a  direct  model  for  simpler  folk, 
as  we  then  could  but  feel  ourselves,  an  embodi 
ment  of  the  gospel  of  esthetics.  Those  more 
resounding  forms  that  our  age  was  to  see  this 
gospel  take  on  were  then  still  to  come,  but  I 
was  to  owe  them  in  the  later  time  not  half  the 
thrill  that  the  La  Farge  of  the  prime  could  set 
in  motion.  He  was  really  an  artistic,  an  esthetic 
nature  of  wondrous  homogeneity;  one  was  to 
have  known  in  the  future  many  an  unfolding 
that  went  with  a  larger  ease  and  a  shrewder 
economy,  but  never  to  have  seen  a  subtler  mind 
or  a  more  generously  wasteful  passion,  in  other 
words  a  sincerer  one,  addressed  to  the  problems 
of  the  designer  and  painter.  Of  his  long  later 
history,  full  of  flights  and  drops,  advances  and 
retreats,  experiment  and  performance,  of  the 
endless  complications  of  curiosity  and  perversity, 
I  say  nothing  here  save  that  if  it  was  to  contradict 
none  of  our  first  impressions  it  was  to  qualify  them 
all  by  others  still  more  lively;  these  things  be 
longing  quite  to  some  other  record.  Yet  I  may 


92    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

just  note  that  they  were  to  represent  in  some 
degree  an  eclipse  of  the  so  essentially  harmonious 
person  round  whom  a  positive  grace  of  legend 
had  originally  formed  itself.  I  see  him  at  this 
hour  again  as  that  bright  apparition;  see  him, 
jacketed  in  black  velvet  or  clad  from  top  to  toe 
in  old-time  elegances  of  cool  white  and  leaning 
much  forward  with  his  protuberant  and  over- 
glazed,  his  doubting  yet  all-seizing  vision,  dandle 
along  the  shining  Newport  sands  in  far-away 
summer  sunsets  on  a  charming  chestnut  mare 
whose  light  legs  and  fine  head  and  great  sweep  of 
tail  showed  the  Arab  strain  —  quite  as  if  (what 
would  have  been  characteristic  of  him)  he  had 
borrowed  his  mount  from  the  adorable  Fromentin, 
whom  we  already  knew  as  a  painter,  but  whose 
acquaintance  as  a  writer  we  were  of  course  so 
promptly  to  owe  him  that  when  "Dominique" 
broke  upon  us  out  of  the  Revue  as  one  of  the 
most  exquisite  literary  events  of  our  time  it  found 
us  doubly  responsive. 

So,  at  any  rate,  he  was  there,  and  there  to 
stay -- intensely  among  us  but  somehow  not 
withal  of  us;  his  being  a  Catholic,  and  apparently 
a  "real"  one  in  spite  of  so  many  other  omnis 
ciences,  making  perhaps  by  itself  the  greatest 
difference.  He  had  been  through  a  Catholic 
college  in  Maryland,  the  name  of  which,  though 
I  am  not  assured  of  it  now,  exhaled  a  sort  of 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    93 

educational  elegance;  but  where  and  when  he 
had  so  miraculously  laid  up  his  stores  'of  reading 
and  achieved  his  universal  saturation  was  what 
we  longest  kept  asking  ourselves.  Many  of  these 
depths  I  couldn't  pretend  to  sound,  but  it  was 
immediate  and  appreciable  that  he  revealed  to 
us  Browning  for  instance;  and  this,  oddly  enough, 
long  after  Men  and  Women  had  begun  (from  our 
Paris  time  on,  if  I  remember)  to  lie  upon  our 
parents'  book-table.  They  had  not  divined  in 
us  as  yet  an  aptitude  for  that  author;  whose 
appeal  indeed  John  reinforced  to  our  eyes  by  the 
reproduction  of  a  beautiful  series  of  illustrative 
drawings,  two  or  three  of  which  he  was  never 
to  surpass  —  any  more  than  he  was  to  complete 
his  highly  distinguished  plan  for  the  full  set, 
not  the  least  faded  of  his  hundred  dreams. 
Most  of  all  he  revealed  to  us  Balzac;  having  so 
much  to  tell  me  of  what  was  within  that  formi 
dably-plated  door,  in  which  he  all  expertly  and 
insidiously  played  the  key,  that  to  re-read  even 
after  long  years  the  introductory  pages  of  Eugenie 
Grandet,  breathlessly  seized  and  earnestly  ab 
sorbed  under  his  instruction,  is  to  see  my  ini 
tiator's  youthful  face,  so  irregular  but  so  re 
fined,  look  out  at  me  between  the  lines  as 
through  blurred  prison  bars.  In  M6rimee,  after 
the  same  fashion,  I  meet  his  expository  ghost  - 
hovering  to  remind  me  of  how  he  started  me  on 


94     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

La  Venus  cTIlle;  so  that  nothing  would  do  but 
that  I  should  translate  it,  try  to  render  it  as 
lovingly  as  if  it  were  a  classic  and  old  (both  of 
which  things  it  now  indeed  is)  and  send  it  off 
to  the  New  York  weekly  periodical  of  that  age  of 
crudest  categories  which  was  to  do  me  the  honour 
neither  of  acknowledging  nor  printing  nor,  clearly, 
since  translations  did  savingly  appear  there,  in 
the  least  understanding  it.  These  again  are 
mild  memories  —  though  not  differing  in  that 
respect  from  most  of  their  associates;  yet  I 
cherish  them  as  ineffaceable  dates,  sudden  mile 
stones,  the  first  distinctly  noted,  on  the  road  of  so 
much  inward  or  apprehensive  life.  Our  guest  —  I 
call  him  our  guest  because  he  was  so  lingeringly, 
so  abidingly  and  supersedingly  present  —  began 
meanwhile  to  paint,  under  our  eyes,  with  devotion, 
with  exquisite  perception,  and  above  all  as  with 
the  implication,  a  hundred  times  beneficent  and 
fertilising,  that  if  one  didn't  in  these  connections 
consistently  take  one's  stand  on  supersubtlety  of 
taste  one  was  a  helpless  outsider  and  at  the  best 
the  basest  of  vulgarians  or  flattest  of  f  rauds - 
a  doctrine  more  salutary  at  that  time  in  our 
world  at  large  than  any  other  that  might  be 
sounded.  Of  all  of  which  ingenuous  intensity 
and  activity  I  should  have  been  a  much  scanter 
witness  than  his  then  close  condisciple,  my 
brother,  had  not  his  personal  kindness,  that 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    95 

of  the  good-natured  and  amused  elder  youth  to 
the  enslaved,  the  yearningly  gullible  younger, 
charmed  me  often  into  a  degree  of  participation. 
Occasions  and  accidents  come  back  to  me  under 
their  wash  of  that  distilled  old  Newport  light 
as  to  which  we  more  and  more  agreed  that  it 
made  altogether  exceptionally,  on  pur  side  of  the 
world,  for  possibility  of  the  nuance,  or  in  other 
words  for  picture  and  story;  such  for  example 
as  my  felt  sense  of  how  unutterably  it  was  the 
real  thing,  the  gage  of  a  great  future,  when  I 
one  morning  found  my  companions  of  the  larger, 
the  serious  studio  inspired  to  splendid  perform 
ance  by  the  beautiful  young  manly  form  of  our 
cousin  Gus  Barker,  then  on  a  vivid  little  dash  of 
a  visit  to  us  and  who,  perched  on  a  pedestal  and 
divested  of  every  garment,  was  the  gayest  as 
well  as  the  neatest  of  models.  This  was  my 
first  personal  vision  of  the  "life,"  on  a  pedestal 
and  in  a  pose,  that  had  half  gleamed  and  half 
gloomed  through  the  chiaroscuro  of  our  old 
friend  Hay  don;  and  I  well  recall  the- crash,  at 
the  sight,  of  all  my  inward  emulation  —  so  forced 
was  I  to  recognise  on  the  spot  that  I  might  niggle 
for  months  over  plaster  casts  and  not  come 
within  miles  of  any  such  point  of  attack.  The 
bravery  of  my  brother's  own  in  especial  dazzled 
me  out  of  every  presumption;  since  nothing  less 
than  that  meant  drawing  (they  were  not  using 


96    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

colour)  and  since  our  genial  kinsman's  perfect 
gymnastic  figure  meant  living  truth,  I  should 
certainly  best  testify  to  the  whole  mystery  by 
pocketing  my  pencil. 

I  secured  and  preserved  for  long  William's 
finished  rendering  of  the  happy  figure  —  which 
was  to  speak  for  the  original,  after  his  gallant 
death,  in  sharper  and  finer  accents  perhaps  than 
aught  else  that  remained  of  him;  and  it  wanted 
but  another  occasion  somewhat  later  on,  that  of 
the  sitting  to  the  pair  of  pupils  under  Hunt's 
direction  of  a  subject  presented  as  a  still  larger 
challenge,  to  feel  that  I  had  irrecoverably  re 
nounced.  Very  handsome  were  the  head  and 
shoulders  of  Katherine  Temple,  the  eldest  of 
those  Albany  cousins  then  gathered  at  Newport 
under  their,  and  derivatively  our,  Aunt  Mary's 
wing,  who  afterwards  was  to  become  Mrs.  Richard 
Emmet  —  the  Temples  and  the  Emmets  being 
so  much  addicted  to  alliances  that  a  still  later 
generation  was  to  bristle  for  us  with  a  delightful 
Emmetry,  each  member  of  it  a  different  blessing; 
she  sat  with  endless  patience,  the  serenest  of 
models,  and  W.  J.'s  portrait  of  her  in  oils  survives 
(as  well  as  La  Farge's,  dealing  with  her  in  another 
view)  as  a  really  mature,  an  almost  masterly, 
piece  of  painting,  having,  as  has  been  happily 
suggested  to  me,  much  the  air  of  a  characteristic 
Manet.  Such  demonstrations  would  throw  one 


Portrait  in  oils  of  Miss  Katherine  Temple,  1861. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    97 

back  on  regret,  so  far  as  my  brother  was 
concerned,  if  subsequent  counter-demonstrations 
hadn't  had  it  in  them  so  much  to  check  the  train. 
For  myself  at  the  hour,  in  any  case,  the  beautiful 
success  with  Kitty  Temple  did  nothing  but  hurry 
on  the  future,  just  as  the  sight  of  the  charming 
thing  to-day,  not  less  than  that  of  La  Farge's 
profit  perdu,  or  presented  ear  and  neck  and 
gathered  braids  of  hair,  quite  as  charming  and 
quite  as  painted,  touchingly  reanimates  the  past. 
I  say  touchingly  because  of  the  remembered 
pang  of  my  acceptance  of  an  admonition  so 
sharply  conveyed.  Therefore  if  somewhat  later 
on  I  could  still  so  fondly  hang  about  in  that  air 
of  production  —  so  far  at  least  as  it  enveloped  our 
friend,  and  particularly  after  his  marriage  and 
his  setting  up  of  his  house  at  Newport,  vivid 
proofs  alike,  as  seemed  to  us  all,  of  his  con 
summate,  his  raffine  taste,  even  if  we  hadn't  yet, 
I  think,  that  epithet  for  this  —  it  was  altogether  in 
the  form  of  mere  helpless  admirer  and  inhaler, 
led  captive  in  part  by  the  dawning  perception 
that  the  arts  were  after  all  essentially  one  and 
that  even  with  canvas  and  brush  whisked  out  of 
my  grasp  I  still  needn't  feel  disinherited.  That 
was  the  luxury  of  the  friend  and  senior  with 
a  literary  side  —  that  if  there  were  futilities  that 
he  didn't  bring  home  to  me  he  nevertheless  opened 
more  windows  than  he  closed;  since  he  couldn't 


NOTES  OF  A  SOX  AND  BROTH  KR 


:...,-  r.uvr/.t  r.^hir..;  by  ^uisiiK  :ny  eye>  to 
so  straight  into  the  square  and  dense  little  formal 
_::-;"  ^:  M^r:::uv.  1  might  OxV;v>ionally  servo 
for  an  abundantly  idle  young  out-of-doors  model 
-as  in  fact  I  frequently  did,  the  best  perhaps  of 
his  eaijy  exhibitions  of  a  rare  colour-sense  even 
now  jfttff**ii  it;  but  mightn't  it  become  possible 


that  Merimee  would  meanwhile  serve  for  mr? 
Didn't  I  already  see,  as  I  fumbled  with  a  pen, 
of  what  Ife  small  dense  formal  garden  might 
be  inspiring^'  symbolic?  It  was  above  all 
wonderful  in  the  La  Fuse  of  those  years  that 
even  as  he  painted  and  painted,  very  slowly  and 
intently  and  bAtodly  —  his  habit  of  putting 
back  the  flock  and  ignuting  every  time-scheme 
but  his  own  was  nurtrhH  only  by  his  view  of  the 
constant  *«•»!••»••«  of  talk,  talk  as  talk,  for  which 
no  moment,  00  suspended  step,  was  too  odd  or 
too  fleeting  —  he  remained  as  referentially  and 
unexhaustedly  bookish,  he  turned  his  back  by 
the  act  as  little  oft  our  theory  of  his  omniscience 
as  be  ceased  to  disown  his  job,  whatever  it  might 
be,  while  endlessly  burying  his  salient  and  re 
inforced  eyes  and  his  visibly  active  organ  of 
scent  in  some  minutest  rarity  of  print,  some 
precious  ancientry  of  binding,  mechanically 
phrhnd,  by  the  hazard  of  a  touch,  from  one  of 
the  shelves  erf  a  stored  collection  that  easily 
passed  with  us  for  unapproached. 


.V/TES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    99 


lost,  himself  on  thf-rse  occasions  both  by  a 
natural  ease  and  by  his  early  adoption  and 
application  of  the  principle  of  the  imperturbable, 
which  promised  even  from  those  days  to  govern 
his  conduct  well-nigh  to  the  exclusion  of  every 
other.  We  were  to  know  surely  as  time  went  on 
no  comparable  case  of  consistency  of  attitude  - 
no  other  such  prompt  grasp  by  a  nature  essentially 
entire,  a  settled  sovereign  self,  of  the  truth  of 
what  would  work  for  it  most  favourably  should 
it  but  succeed  in  never  yielding  the  first  inch  of 
any  ground.  Immense  every  ground  thus  be 
came  by  its  covering  itself  from  edge  to  edge  with 
the  defence  of  his  serenity,  which,  whatever  his 
fathomless  private  dealings  with  it,  was  never 
consentingly,  I  mean  publicly,  to  suffer  a  grain 
of  abatement.  The  artist's  serenity,  by  this 
conception,  was  an  intellectual  and  spiritual 
capital  that  must  never  brook  defeat  —  which  it 
so  easily  might  incur  by  a  single  act  of  abdication. 
That  was  at  any  rate  the  case  for  the  particular 
artist  and  the  particular  nature  he  felt  himself, 
armour-proof  as  they  became  against  the  appeal 
of  sacrifice.  Sacrifice  was  fallibility,  and  one 
could  only  of  course  be  consistent  if  one  in- 
veterately  had  hold  of  the  truth.  There  was  no 
safety  or,  otherwise,  no  inward  serenity  or  even 
outward  —  though  the  outward  came  secondly  - 
unless  there  was  no  deflection;  none  into  the 


100    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

question,  that  is,  of  what  might  make  for  the 
serenity  of  others,  which  was  their  own  affair 
and  which  above  all  seemed  not  urgent  in  com 
parison  with  the  supreme  artistic.  It  wasn't  that 
the  artist  hadn't  to  pay,  to  pay  for  the  general 
stupidity,  perversity  and  perfidy,  from  the 
moment  he  might  have  to  deal  with  these  things; 
that  was  the  inevitable  suffering,  and  it  was 
always  there;  but  it  could  be  more  or  less  borne 
if  one  was  systematically,  or  rather  if  one  was 
naturally,  or  even,  better  still,  preternaturally, 
in  the  right;  since  this  meant  the  larger,  the 
largest  serenity.  That  account  of  so  fine  a  case 
of  inward  confidence  would  indeed  during  those 
very  first  years  have  sinned  somewhat  by  anticipa 
tion  ;  yet  something  of  the  beauty  —  that  is  of  the 
unmatched  virtuosity  —  of  the  attitude  finally 
achieved  did  even  at  the  early  time  colour  the 
air  of  intercourse  with  him  for  those  who  had 
either  few  enough  or  many  enough  of  their  own 
reserves.  The  second  of  these  conditions  sprang 
from  a  due  anxiety  for  one's  own  interests,  more 
or  less  defined  in  advance  and  therefore,  as  might 
be,  more  or  less  menaced;  the  other  proviso 
easily  went  with  vagueness  —  vagueness  as  to  what 
things  were  one's  interests,  seeing  that  the  ex 
hibited  working  of  an  esthetic  and  a  moral 
confidence  conjoined  on  that  scale  and  at  play 
together  unhampered  would  perhaps  prove  for 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    101 

the  time  an  attraction  beyond  any  other.  This 
reflection  must  verily,  in  our  relation,  have 
brought  about  my  own  quietus  —  so  far  as  that 
mild  ecstasy  could  be  divorced  from  agitation. 
I  recall  at  all  events  less  of  the  agitation  than  of 
the  ecstasy;  the  primary  months,  certain  aspects 
even  of  the  few  following  years,  look  out  at  me 
as  from  fine  accommodations,  acceptances,  sub 
missions,  emotions,  all  melted  together,  that  one 
must  have  taken  for  joys  of  the  mind  and  gains 
of  the  imagination  so  clear  as  to  cost  one  practically 
nothing.  They  are  what  I  see,  and  are  all  I  want 
to  see,  as  I  look  back;  there  hangs  about  them 
a  charm  of  thrilled  good  faith,  the  flush  and 
throb  of  crowding  apprehensions,  that  has  scarce 
faded  and  of  which  I  can  only  wish  to  give  the 
whole  picture  the  benefit.  I  bottle  this  im 
ponderable  extract  of  the  loitering  summers  of 
youth,  when  every  occasion  really  seemed  to 
stay  to  be  gathered  and  tasted,  just  for  the  sake 
of  its  faint  sweetness. 

Some  time  since,  in  Boston,  I  spent  an  hour 
before  a  commemorative  cluster  of  La  Farge's 
earlier  productions,  gathered  in  on  the  occasion 
of  his  death,  with  the  effect  as  of  a  plummet 
suddenly  dropped  into  obscure  depths  long  un 
stirred,  that  of  a  remembered  participation,  it 
didn't  seem  too  much  to  say,  in  the  far-away 
difficult  business  of  their  getting  themselves  born. 


102    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

These  things,  almost  all  finished  studies  of  land 
scape,  small  and  fond  celebrations  of  the  modest 
little  Newport  harmonies,  the  spare  felicities 
and  delicacies  of  a  range  of  aspects  that  have 
ceased  to  appeal  or  to  "count,"  called  back  into 
life  a  hundred  memories,  laid  bare  the  very  foot 
steps  of  time,  light  and  uncertain  though  so  often 
the  imprint.  I  seemed  so  to  have  been  there  by 
the  projection  of  curiosity  and  sympathy,  if  not 
by  having  literally  looked  in,  when  the  greater 
number  of  such  effects  worked  themselves  out, 
that  they  spoke  to  me  of  my  own  history  - 
through  the  felt  intensity  of  my  commission,  as 
it  were,  to  speak  for  my  old  friend.  The  terms 
on  which  he  was  ever  ready  to  draw  out  for  us 
the  interesting  hours,  terms  of  patience  as  they 
essentially  were  for  the  edified  party,  lived  again 
in  this  record,  but  with  the  old  supposition  of 
profit,  or  in  other  words  the  old  sense  of  pleasure, 
of  precious  acquisition  and  intenser  experience, 
more  vivid  than  anything  else.  There  recurs  to 
me  for  instance  one  of  the  smallest  of  adventures, 
as  tiny  a  thing  as  could  incur  the  name  and  which 
was  of  the  early  stage  of  our  acquaintance,  when 
he  proposed  to  me  that  we  should  drive  out  to  the 
Glen,  some  six  miles  off,  to  breakfast,  and  should 
afterwards  paint  —  we  paint!  —  in  the  bosky  open 
air.  It  looks  at  this  distance  a  mythic  time,  that 
of  felt  inducements  to  travel  so  far  at  such  an 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    103 

hour  and  in  a  backless  buggy  on  the  supposition 
of  rustic  fare.  But  different  ages  have  different 
measures,  and  I  quite  remember  how  ours,  that 
morning,  at  the  neat  hostel  in  the  umbrageous 
valley,  overflowed  with  coffee  and  griddle-cakes 
that  were  not  as  other  earthly  refreshment,  and 
how  a  spell  of  romance  rested  for  several  hours 
on  our  invocation  of  the  genius  of  the  scene:  of 
such  material,  with  the  help  of  the  attuned  spirit, 
may  great  events  consent  to  be  composed.  My 
companion,  his  easel  and  canvas,  his  palette  and 
stool  and  other  accessories  happily  placed,  settled 
to  his  subject,  while  I,  at  a  respectful  distance, 
settled  to  mine  and  to  the  preparation  of  this 
strange  fruit  of  time,  my  having  kept  the  im 
pression  as  if  it  really  mattered.  It  did  indeed 
matter,  it  was  to  continue  to  have  done  so,  and 
when  I  ask  myself  the  reason  I  find  this  in  some 
thing  as  rare  and  deep  and  beautiful  as  a  passage 
of  old  poetry,  a  scrap  of  old  legend,  in  the  vague 
ness  of  rustling  murmuring  green  and  plashing 
water  and  woodland  voices  and  images,  flitting 
hovering  possibilities;  the  most  retained  of  these 
last  of  course  being  the  chance  that  one's  small 
daub  (for  I  too  had  my  easel  and  panel  and 
palette)  might  incur  appreciation  by  the  eye  of 
friendship.  This  indeed  was  the  true  source  of 
the  spell,  that  it  was  in  the  eye  of  friendship, 
friendship  full  of  character  and  colour,  and  full 


104    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

of  amusement  of  its  own,  that  I  lived  on  any 
such  occasion,  and  that  I  had  come  forth  in  the 
morning  cool  and  had  found  our  breakfast  at 
the  inn  a  thing  of  ineffable  savour,  and  that  I 
now  sat  and  flurriedly  and  fearfully  aspired. 
Yes,  the  interesting  ineffectual  and  exquisite 
array  of  the  Boston  "show"  smote  for  me  most 
the  chord  of  the  prime  questions,  the  admirations 
and  expectations  at  first  so  confident,  even  that 
of  those  refinements  of  loyalty  out  of  which  the 
last  and  highest  tribute  was  to  spring;  the  con 
sideration,  I  mean,  of  whether  our  extraordi 
nary  associate,  neither  promptly  understood  nor 
inveterately  accepted,  might  not  eventually  be 
judged  such  a  colourist  and  such  a  poet  that 
owners  of  his  first  felicities,  those  very  ones  over 
which  he  was  actually  bending,  and  with  a  touch 
so  inscrutable,  such  "tonalities"  of  his  own, 
would  find  themselves  envied  and  rich.  I  re 
member  positively  liking  to  see  most  people 
stupid  about  him,  and  to  make  them  out,  I  dare 
say,  more  numerously  stupid  than  they  really 
were:  this  perhaps  in  some  degree  as  a  bright 
communication  of  his  own  spirit  —  which  dis 
cerned  from  so  far  off  that  of  the  bitterest-sweet 
cup  it  was  abundantly  to  taste;  and  partly 
because  the  case  would  after  that  fashion  only 
have  its  highest  interest.  The  highest  interest, 
the  very  highest,  it  certainly  couldn't  fail  to 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     105 

have;  and  the  beauty  of  a  final  poetic  justice, 
with  exquisite  delays,  the  whole  romance  of 
conscious  delicacy  and  heroic  patience  inter 
vening,  was  just  what  we  seemed  to  see  mean 
while  stow  itself  expectantly  away. 

This  view  of  the  inevitable  fate  of  distinguished 
work  was  thus,  on  my  part,  as  it  comes  before 
me  again,  of  early  development,  and  I  admit  that 
I  should  appear  to  antedate  it  hadn't  I  in  renewed 
presence  of  each  of  the  particular  predestined 
objects  of  sacrifice  I  have  glanced  at  caught  myself 
in  the  very  act  of  that  invidious  apprehension, 
that  fondest  contemporaneity.  There  were  the 
charming  individual  things  round  the  production 
of  which  I  had  so  at  once  elatedly  and  resignedly 
circled;  and  nothing  remained  at  the  end  of  time 
but  to  test  the  historic  question.  Was  the  quiet 
chamber  of  the  Boston  museum  a  constitution 
of  poetic  justice  long  awaited  and  at  last  fully 
cognisant?  —  or  did  the  event  perhaps  fail  to  give 
out,  after  all,  the  essence  of  our  far-away  forecast? 
I  think  that  what  showed  clearest,  or  what  I, 
at  any  rate,  most  sharply  felt,  was  the  very 
difficulty  of  saying;  which  fact  meant  of  course, 
I  recognise,  that  the  story  fell  a  little  short,  alas, 
of  rounding  itself  off.  Poetic  justice,  when  it 
comes,  I  gather,  comes  ever  with  a  great  shining; 
so  that  if  there  is  any  doubt  about  it  the  source 
of  the  doubt  is  in  the  very  depths  of  the  case  and 
has  been  from  the  first  at  work  there.  It  literally 


106     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

seems  to  me,  besides,  that  there  was  more  history 
and    thereby    more    interest    recoverable    as    the 
matter  stood  than  if  every  answer  to  every  question 
about   it   hadn't   had   a   fine   ambiguity.     I   like 
ambiguities    and    detest    great  glares;    preferring 
thus  for  my  critical  no  less  than  for  my  pedestrian 
progress  the  cool  and  the  shade  to  the  sun  and 
dust  of  the  way.     There  was  an  exquisite  effort 
of  which  I  had  been  peculiarly  sure;  the  large 
canvas  of  the  view  of  the  Paradise  Rocks  over 
against    Newport,    but    within    the    island    and 
beyond    the    "second    beach"    -such    were    our 
thin   designations!     On   the   high   style   and   the 
grand  manner  of  this  thing,  even  though  a  little 
uneasy  before  the  absence  from  it  of  a  certain 
crdnerie   of   touch,    I    would   have    staked   every 
grain   of   my   grounded   sensibility  -  -  in   spite   of 
which,  on  second  thoughts,  I  shall  let  that  faded 
fact,  and  no  other  contention  at  all,  be  my  last 
word  about  it.     For  the  prevailing  force,  within 
the  Boston  walls,   the   supreme  magic  anything 
was  to  distil,  just  melted  into  another  connection 
which  flung  a  soft  mantle  as  over  the  whole  show. 
It  became,  from  the  question  of  how  even  a  man 
of  perceptive  genius  had  painted  what  we  then 
locally  regarded  as  our  scenery,  a  question  of  how 
we  ourselves  had  felt  and  cherished  that  scenery; 
which  latter  of  these  two  memories  swept  for  me 
everything  before  it.     The  scenery  we  cherished  - 
by  which  I  really  mean,  I  fear,  but  four  or  five  of 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     107 

us  —  has  now  been  grossly  and  utterly  sacrificed ; 
in  the  sense  that  its  range  was  all  for  the  pedestrian 
measure,  that  to  overwalk  it  was  to  love  it  and 
to  love  it  to  overwalk  it,  and  that  no  such  relation 
with  it  as  either  of  these  appears  possible  or 
thinkable  to-day.  We  had,  the  four  or  five 
of  us,  the  instinct  —  the  very  finest  this  must  have 
been  —  of  its  scale  and  constitution,  the  adorable 
wise  economy  with  which  nature  had  handled  it 
and  in  the  light  of  which  the  whole  seaward  and 
insular  extension  of  the  comparatively  futile 
town,  untrodden,  unsuspected,  practically  all 
inviolate,  offered  a  course  for  the  long  afternoon 
ramble  more  in  harmony  with  the  invocations, 
or  for  that  matter  the  evocations,  of  youth  than 
we  most  of  us,  with  appreciation  so  rooted,  were 
perhaps  ever  to  know.  We  knew  already,  we 
knew  then,  that  no  such  range  of  airs  would  ever 
again  be  played  for  us  on  but  two  or  three  silver 
strings.  They  were  but  two  or  three  —  the  sea 
so  often  as  of  the  isles  of  Greece,  the  mildly  but 
perpetually  embayed  promontories  of  mossy  rock 
and  wasted  thankless  pasture,  bathed  in  a  refine 
ment  of  radiance  and  a  sweetness  of  solitude 
which  amounted  in  themselves  to  the  highest 
"finish";  and  little  more  than  the  feeling,  with 
all  this,  or  rather  with  no  more  than  this,  that 
possession,  discrimination,  far  frequentation,  were 
ours  alone,  and  that  a  grassy  rocky  tide-washed, 


108    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

just  a  bare,  though  ever  so  fine-grained,  toned 
and  tinted  breast  of  nature  and  field  of  fancy 
stretched  for  us  to  the  low  horizon's  furthest  rim. 
The  vast  region  —  it  struck  us  then  as  vast  —  was 
practically  roadless,  but  this,  far  from  making 
it  a  desert,  made  it  a  kind  of  boundless  empty 
carpeted  saloon.  It  comes  back  to  me  that 
nobody  in  those  days  walked,  nobody  but  the 
three  or  four  of  us  —  or  indeed  I  should  say,  if 
pushed,  the  single  pair  in  particular  of  whom  I 
was  one  and  the  other  Thomas  Sargeant  Perry, 
superexcellent  and  all-reading,  all-engulfing  friend 
of  those  days  and  still,  sole  survivor,  of  these, 
I  thus  found  deeply  consecrated  that  love  of  the 
long,  again  and  again  of  the  very  longest  possible, 
walk  which  was  to  see  me,  year  after  year,  through 
so  many  of  the  twists  and  past  so  many  of  the 
threatened  blocks  of  life's  road,  and  which,  during 
the  early  and  American  period,  was  to  make  me 
lone  and  perverse  even  in  my  own  sight:  so  little 
was  it  ever  given  me  then,  wherever  I  scanned 
the  view,  to  descry  a  fellow-pedestrian.  The 
pedestrians  came  to  succumb  altogether,  at 
Newport,  to  this  virtual  challenge  of  their  strange 
agitation  —  by  the  circumstance,  that  is,  of  their 
being  offered  at  last,  to  importunity,  the  vulgar 
road,  under  the  invasion  of  which  the  old  rich 
alternative  miserably  dwindled. 


NOTHING  meanwhile  could  have  been  less 
logical,  yet  at  the  same  time  more  natu 
ral,  than  that  William's  interest  in  the 
practice  of  painting  should  have  suddenly  and 
abruptly  ceased;  a  turn  of  our  affair  attended, 
however,  with  no  shade  of  commotion,  no  repining 
at  proved  waste;  with  as  little  of  any  confessed 
ruefulness  of  mistake  on  one  side  as  of  any  elation 
of  wisdom,  any  resonance  of  the  ready  "I  told 
you  so"  on  the  other.  The  one  side  would  have 
been,  with  a  different  tone  about  the  matter  and 
a  different  domestic  habit  than  ours,  that  of  my 
brother's  awkwardness,  accompanying  whatever 
intelligence,  of  disavowal,  and  the  other  been  our 
father's  not  unemphatic  return  to  the  point  that 
his  doubts,  those  originally  and  confidently  inti 
mated,  had  been  justified  by  the  fact.  Tempting 
doubtless  in  a  heavier  household  air  the  opportu 
nity  on  the  latter's  part  to  recall  that  if  he  had 
perfectly  recognised  his  son's  probable  progress 
to  a  pitch  of  excellence  he  had  exactly  not  granted 
that  an  attainment  of  this  pitch  was  likely  in  the 
least,  however  uncontested,  to  satisfy  the  nature 
concerned;  the  foregone  conclusion  having  all  the 
while  been  that  such  a  spirit  was  competent 

109 


110    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

to  something  larger  and  less  superficially  calcu 
lable,  something  more  expressive  of  its  true  in 
wardness.  This  was  not  the  way  in  which 
things  happened  among  us,  for  I  really  think 
the  committed  mistake  was  ever  discriminated 
against  —  certainly  by  the  head  of  the  family  - 
only  to  the  extent  of  its  acquiring,  even  if  but 
speedily  again  to  fade,  an  interest  greater  than 
was  obtainable  by  the  too  obvious  success.  I 
am  not  sure  indeed  that  the  kind  of  personal 
history  most  appealing  to  my  father  would  not 
have  been  some  kind  that  should  fairly  proceed 
by  mistakes,  mistakes  more  human,  more  associa- 
tional,  less  angular,  less  hard  for  others,  that  is 
less  exemplary  for  them  (since  righteousness,  as 
mostly  understood,  was  in  our  parent's  view,  I 
think,  the  cruellest  thing  in  the  world)  than 
straight  and  smug  and  declared  felicities.  The 
qualification  here,  I  allow,  would  be  in  his  scant 
measure  of  the  difference,  after  all,  for  the  life  of 
the  soul,  between  the  marked  achievement  and 
the  marked  shortcoming.  He  had  a  manner  of 
his  own  of  appreciating  failure,  or  of  not  at  least 
piously  rejoicing  in  displayed  moral,  intellectual, 
or  even  material,  economies,  which,  had  it  not  been 
that  his  humanity,  his  generosity  and,  for  the 
most  part,  his  gaiety,  were  always,  at  the  worst, 
consistent,  might  sometimes  have  left  us  with  our 
small  savings,  our  little  exhibitions  and  com- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    111 

placencies,  rather  on  our  hands.  As  the  case  stood 
I  find  myself  thinking  of  our  life  in  those  years 
as  profiting  greatly  for  animation  and  curiosity 
by  the  interest  he  shed  for  us  on  the  whole  side 
of  the  human  scene  usually  held  least  interesting 
-  the  element,  the  appearance,  of  waste  which 
plays  there  such  a  part  and  into  which  he  could 
read  under  provocation  so  much  character  and 
colour  and  charm,  so  many  implications  of  the 
fine  and  the  worthy,  that,  since  the  art  of  missing 
or  of  failing,  or  of  otherwise  going  astray,  did 
after  all  in  his  hands  escape  becoming  either  a 
matter  of  real  example  or  of  absolute  precept, 
enlarged  not  a  little  our  field  and  our  categories 
of  appreciation  and  perception.  I  recover  as  I 
look  back  on  all  this  the  sense  as  of  an  extraor 
dinary  young  confidence,  our  common  support, 
in  our  coming  round  together,  through  the 
immense  lubrication  of  his  expressed  thought, 
often  perhaps  extravagantly  working  and  playing, 
to  plenty  of  unbewildered  Tightness,  a  state  of 
comfort  that  would  always  serve  —  whether  after 
strange  openings  into  a  sphere  where  nothing 
practical  mattered,  or  after  even  still  quainter 
closings  in  upon  us  of  unexpected  importances 
and  values.  Which  means,  to  my  memory, 
that  we  breathed  somehow  an  air  in  which  waste, 
for  us  at  least,  couldn't  and  didn't  live,  so  certain 
were  aberrations  and  discussions,  adventures, 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

excursions  and  alarms  of  whatever  sort,  to  wind 
up  in  a  "transformation  scene"  or,  if  the  term 
be  not  profane,  happy  harlequinade;  a  figuration 
of  each  involved  issue  and  item  before  the  foot 
lights  of  a  familiar  idealism,  the  most  socialised 
and  ironised,  the  most  amusedly  generalised,  that 
possibly  could  be. 

Such  an  atmosphere  was,  taking  one  of  its 
elements  with  another,  doubtless  delightful;  yet 
if  it  was  friendly  to  the  suggested  or  imagined 
thing  it  promoted  among  us  much  less  directly, 
as  I  have  already  hinted,  the  act  of  choice  - 
choice  as  to  the  "career"  for  example,  with  a 
view  of  the  usual  proceedings  thereupon  con 
sequent.  I  marvel  at  the  manner  in  which  the 
door  appears  to  have  been  held  or  at  least  left 
open  to  us  for  experiment,  though  with  a  tendency 
to  close,  the  oddest  yet  most  inveterately  per 
ceptible  movement  in  that  sense,  before  any  very 
earnest  proposition  in  particular.  I  have  no 
remembrance  at  all  of  marked  prejudices  on  our 
father's  part,  but  I  recall  repeated  cases,  in  his 
attitude  to  our  young  affairs,  of  a  disparagement 
suggested  as  by  stirred  memories  of  his  own; 
the  instance  most  present  to  me  being  his  extreme 
tepidity  in  the  matter  of  William's,  or  in  fact  of 
my,  going,  on  our  then  American  basis,  to  college. 
I  make  out  in  him,  and  at  the  time  made  out,  a 
great  revulsion  of  spirit  from  that  incurred  ex- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     113 

perience  in  his  own  history,  a  revulsion  I  think 
moreover  quite  independent  of  any  particular 
or  instrinsic  attributes  of  the  seat  of  learning 
involved  in  it.  Union  College,  Schenectady,  New 
York,  the  scene  of  his  personal  experiment  and 
the  natural  resort,  in  his  youth,  of  comparatively 
adjacent  Albanians,  might  easily  have  offered  at 
that  time  no  very  rare  opportunities  —  few  were 
the  American  country  colleges  that  then  had 
such  to  offer;  but  when,  after  years,  the  question 
arose  for  his  sons  he  saw  it  in  I  scarce  know  what 
light  of  associational  or  " subjective"  dislike. 
He  had  the  disadvantage  —  unless  indeed  it  was 
much  more  we  who  had  it  —  of  his  having,  after 
many  changes  and  detachments,  ceased  to  believe 
in  the  Schenectady  resource,  or  to  revert  to  it 
sentimentally,  without  his  forming  on  the  other 
hand,  with  his  boys  to  place,  any  fonder  pre 
sumption  or  preference.  There  comes  out  to  me, 
much  bedimmed  but  recognisable,  the  image  of 
a  day  of  extreme  youth  on  which,  during  a  stay 
with  our  grandmother  at  Albany,  we  achieved, 
William  and  I,  with  some  confused  and  heated 
railway  effort,  a  pious  pilgrimage  to  the  small 
scholastic  city --pious  by  reason,  I  clearly  re 
member,  of  a  lively  persuasion  on  my  brother's 
part  that  to  Union  College,  at  some  indefinite 
future  time,  we  should  both  most  naturally  and 
delightedly  repair.  We  invoked,  I  gather,  among 


114    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

its  scattered  shades,  fairly  vague  to  me  now,  the 
loyalty  that  our  parent  appeared  to  have  dropped 
by  the  way  —  even  though  our  attitude  about  it 
can  scarce  have  been  prematurely  contentious; 
the  whole  vision  is  at  any  rate  to-day  bathed  and 
blurred  for  me  in  the  air  of  some  charmed  and 
beguiled  dream,  that  of  the  flushed  good  faith 
of  an  hour  of  crude  castle-building.  We  were 
helped  to  build,  on  the  spot,  by  an  older  friend, 
much  older,  as  I  remember  him,  even  than  my 
brother,  already  a  member  of  the  college  and, 
as  it  seemed,  greatly  enjoying  his  life  and  those 
"society"  badges  and  trinkets  with  which  he 
reappears  to  me  as  bristling  and  twinkling  quite 
to  the  extinction  of  his  particular  identity.  This 
is  lost,  like  everything  else,  in  the  mere  golden 
haze  of  the  little  old-time  autumn  adventure. 
Wondrous  to  our  sensibility  may  well  have  been 
the  October  glamour  —  if  October  it  was,  and 
if  it  was  not  it  ought  to  have  been !  —  of  that 
big  brave  region  of  the  great  State  over  which 
the  shade  of  Fenimore  Cooper's  Mohawks  and 
Mohicans  (if  this  be  not  a  pleonasm)  might  still 
have  been  felt  to  hang.  The  castle  we  had  built, 
however,  crumbled -- there  were  plenty  of  others 
awaiting  erection;  these  too  successively  had 
their  hour,  but  I  needn't  at  this  time  stoop  to 
pick  up  their  pieces.  I  see  moreover  vividly 
enough  how  it  might  have  been  that,  at  this 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    115 

stage,  our  parents  were  left  cold  by  the  various 
appeal,  in  our  interest,  of  Columbia,  Harvard 
and  Yale.  Hard  by,  at  Providence,  in  the 
Newport  time,  was  also  "Brown";  but  I 
recover  no  connection  in  which  that  mystic 
syllable  swept  our  sky  as  a  name  to  conjure 
with.  Our  largest  licence  somehow  didn't  stray 
toward  Brown.  It  was  to  the  same  tune  not  con 
ceivable  that  we  should  have  been  restored  for 
educational  purposes  to  the  swollen  city,  the  New 
York  of  our  childhood,  where  we  had  then  so 
tumbled  in  and  out  of  school  as  to  exhaust  the 
measure,  or  as  at  least  greatly  to  deflower  the 
image,  of  our  teachability  on  that  ground.  Yale, 
off  our  beat  from  every  point  of  view,  was  as  little 
to  be  thought  of,  and  there  was  moreover  in  our 
father's  imagination  no  grain  of  susceptibility  to 
what  might  have  been,  on  the  general  ground, 
"socially  expected."  Even  Harvard,  clearly - 
and  it  was  perhaps  a  trifle  odd  —  moved  him  in 
our  interest  as  little  as  Schenectady  could  do; 
so  that,  for  authority,  the  voice  of  social  ex 
pectation  would  have  had  to  sound  with  an  art 
or  an  accent  of  which  it  had  by  no  means  up 
to  that  time  learned  roundabout  us  the  trick. 
This  indeed  (it  comes  to  saying)  is  something 
that,  so  far  as  our  parents  were  concerned,  it 
would  never  have  learned.  They  were,  from 
other  preoccupations,  unaware  of  any  such 


116    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

pressure;  and  to  become  aware  would,  I  think, 
primarily  have  been  for  them  to  find  it  out  of  all 
proportion  to  the  general  pitch  of  prescription. 
We  were  not  at  that  time,  when  it  came  to  such 
claims,  in  presence  of  persuasive,  much  less  of 
impressive,  social  forms  and  precedents  —  at  least 
those  of  us  of  the  liberated  mind  and  the  really 
more  curious  culture  were  not;  the  more  curious 
culture,  only  to  be  known  by  the  positive  taste 
of  it,  was  nowhere  in  the  air,  nowhere  seated  or 
embodied. 

Which  reflections,  as  I  perhaps  too  loosely 
gather  them  in,  refresh  at  any  rate  my  sense 
of  how  we  in  particular  of  our  father's  house 
actually  profited  more  than  we  lost,  if  the  more 
curious  culture  was  in  question,  by  the  degree 
to  which  we  were  afloat  and  disconnected;  since 
there  were  at  least  luxuries  of  the  spirit  in  this 
quite  as  much  as  drawbacks  —  given  a  social 
order  (so  far  as  it  was  an  order)  that  found  its 
main  ideal  in  a  "strict  attention  to  business," 
that  is  to  buying  and  selling  over  a  counter  or  a 
desk,  and  in  such  an  intensity  of  the  traffic  as 
made,  on  the  part  of  all  involved,  for  close 
localisation.  To  attend  strictly  to  business  was 
to  be  invariably  there,  on  a  certain  spot  in  a 
certain  place;  just  as  to  be  nowhere  in  particular, 
to  have  to  be  nowhere,  told  the  queer  tale  of  a  lack 
or  of  a  forfeiture,  or  possibly  even  of  a  state  of 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    117 

intrinsic  un worthiness.  I  have  already  expressed 
how  few  of  these  elements  of  the  background 
we  ourselves  had  ever  had  either  to  add  to  or  to 
subtract  from,  and  how  this  of  itself  did  after  a 
fashion  "place"  us  in  the.  small  Newport  colony 
of  the  despoiled  and  disillusioned,  the  mildly,  the 
reminiscentially  desperate.  As  easy  as  might  be, 
for  the  time,  I  have  also  noted,  was  our  footing 
there;  but  I  have  not,  for  myself,  forgotten,  or 
even  now  outlived,  the  particular  shade  of  satis 
faction  to  be  taken  in  one's  thus  being  in  New 
England  without  being  of  it.  To  have  originally 
been  of  it,  or  still  to  have  had  to  be,  affected  me, 
I  recall,  as  a  case  I  should  have  regretted  —  unless 
it  be  more  exact  to  say  that  I  thought  of  the 
condition  as  a  danger  after  all  escaped.  Long 
would  it  take  to  tell  why  it  figured  as  a  danger, 
and  why  that  impression  was  during  the  several 
following  years  much  more  to  gain  than  to  lose 
intensity.  The  question  was  to  fall  into  the  rear 
indeed,  with  ever  so  many  such  secondary  others, 
during  the  War,  and  for  reasons  effective  enough; 
but  it  was  afterwards  to  know  a  luxury  of  emer 
gence —  this,  I  mean,  while  one  still  "cared,"  in 
general,  as  one  was  sooner  or  later  to  stop  caring. 
Infinitely  interesting  to  recover,  in  the  history 
of  a  mind,  for  those  concerned,  these  movements 
of  the  spirit,  these  tides  and  currents  of  growth  - 
though  under  the  inconvenience  for  the  historian 


118    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

of  such  ramifications  of  research  that  here  at  any 
rate  I  feel  myself  warned  off.  There  appeared 
to  us  at  Newport  the  most  interesting,  much,  of 
the  Albany  male  cousins,  William  James  Temple 
-  coming,  oddly  enough,  first  from  Yale  and  then 
from  Harvard;  so  that  by  contact  and  example 
the  practicability  of  a  like  experience  might  have 
been,  and  doubtless  was,  put  well  before  us. 
"Will"  Temple,  as  we  were  in  his  short  life  too 
scantly  to  know  him,  had  made  so  luckless,  even 
if  so  lively  a  start  under  one  alma  mater  that  the 
appeal  to  a  fresh  parentship  altogether  appears 
to  have  been  judged  the  best  remedy  for  his  case: 
he  entered  Harvard  jumping,  if  I  mistake  not, 
a  couple  of  years  of  the  undergraduate  curriculum, 
and  my  personal  memory  of  these  reappearances 
is  a  mere  recapture  of  admiration,  of  prostration, 
before  him.  The  dazzled  state,  under  his  striking 
good  looks  and  his  manly  charm,  was  the  common 
state;  so  that  I  disengage  from  it  no  presumption 
of  a  particular  plea  playing  in  our  own  domestic 
air  for  his  temporary  Cambridge  setting;  he 
was  so  much  too  radiant  and  gallant  and  personal, 
too  much  a  character  and  a  figure,  a  splendid 
importance  in  himself,  to  owe  the  least  glamour 
to  settings;  an  advantage  that  might  have 
seemed  rather  to  be  shed  on  whatever  scene  by 
himself  in  consenting  to  light  it  up.  He  made 
all  life  for  the  hour  a  foreground,  and  one  that 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     119 

we  none  of  us  would  have  quitted  for  a  moment 
while  he  was  there. 

In  that  form  at  least  I  see  him,  and  no  revival 
of  those  years  so  puts  to  me  the  interesting 
question,  so  often  aimlessly  returned  upon  in 
later  life,  of  the  amount  of  truth  in  this  or  that 
case  of  young  confidence  in  a  glory  to  come  - 
for  another  than  one's  self;  of  the  likelihood  of 
the  wonders  so  flatteringly  forecast.  Many  of 
our  estimates  were  monstrous  magnifications  - 
though  doing  us  even  at  that  more  good  than 
harm;  so  that  one  isn't  even  sure  that  the 
happiest  histories  were  to  have  been  those  of  the 
least  liberal  mistakes.  I  like  at  any  rate  to  think 
of  our  easy  overstrainings -- the  possible  flaw  in 
many  of  which  was  not  indeed  to  be  put  to  the 
proof.  That  was  the  case  for  the  general,  and  for 
every  particular,  impression  of  Will  Temple, 
thanks  to  his  early  death  in  battle  -  -  at  Chancel 
lors  ville,  1863;  he  having,  among  the  quickened 
forces  of  the  time,  and  his  father's  record  helping 
him,  leaped  to  a  captaincy  in  the  regular  Army; 
but  I  cling  to  the  idea  that  the  siftings  and  sortings 
of  life,  had  he  remained  subject  to  them,  would 
still  have  left  him  the  lustre  that  blinds  and 
subdues.  I  even  do  more,  at  this  hour;  I  ask 
myself,  while  his  appearance  and  my  personal 
feeling  about  it  live  for  me  again,  what  possible 
aftertime  could  have  kept  up  the  pitch  of  my 


120    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

sentiment  —  aftertime  either  of  his  or  of  mine. 
Blest  beyond  others,  I  think  as  we  look  back,  the 
admirations,  even  the  fondest  (and  which  indeed 
were  not  of  their  nature  fond?)  that  were  not  to 
know  to  their  cost  the  inevitable  test  or  strain; 
they  are  almost  the  only  ones,  of  the  true  high 
pitch,  that,  without  broken  edges  or  other  tatters 
to  show,  fold  themselves  away  entire  and  secure, 
even  as  rare  lengths  of  precious  old  stuff,  in  the 
scented  chest  of  our  savings.  So  great  mis 
adventure  have  too  often  known  at  all  events 
certain  of  those  that  were  to  come  to  trial.  The 
others  are  the  residual,  those  we  must  keep  when 
we  can,  so  to  be  sure  at  least  of  a  few,  sacrificing 
as  many  possible  mistakes  and  misproportions 
as  need  be  to  pay  but  for  two  or  three  of  them. 
There  could  be  no  mistake  about  Gus  Barker, 
who  threw  himself  into  the  fray,  that  is  into  the 
cavalry  saddle,  as  he  might  into  a  match  at 
baseball  (football  being  then  undreamt  of),  and 
my  last  reminiscence  of  whom  is  the  sight  of  him, 
on  a  brief  leave  for  a  farewell  to  his  Harvard 
classmates  after  he  had  got  his  commission, 
crossing  with  two  or  three  companions  the  ex 
panse  of  Harvard  Square  that  faced  the  old  Law 
School,  of  which  I  found  myself  for  that  year 
(1862-63)  a  singularly  alien  member.  I  was  after 
wards  sharply  to  regret  the  accident  by  which  I 
on  that  occasion  missed  speech  of  him;  but  my 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

present  vision  of  his  charming  latent  agility, 
which  any  motion  showed,  of  his  bright-coloured 
wagging  head  and  of  the  large  gaiety  of  the  young 
smile  that  made  his  handsome  teeth  shine  out, 
is  after  all  the  years  but  the  more  happily  un- 
effaced.  The  point  of  all  which  connections, 
however,  is  that  they  somehow  managed  to  make 
in  the  parental  view  no  straight  links  for  us 
with  the  matter-of-course  of  college.  There  were 
accidents  too  by  the  aid  of  which  they  failed  of 
this  the  more  easily.  It  comes  to  me  that,  for 
my  own  part,  I  thought  of  William  at  the  time 
as  having,  or  rather  as  so  much  more  than  having, 
already  graduated;  the  effect  of  contact  with  his 
mind  and  talk,  with  the  free  play  of  his  spirit 
and  the  irrepressible  brush  of  his  humour,  couldn't 
have  been  greater  had  he  carried  off  fifty  honours. 
I  felt  in  him  such  authority,  so  perpetually 
quickened  a  state  of  intellect  and  character,  that 
the  detail  or  the  literal  side  of  the  question  never 
so  much  as  came  up  for  me :  I  must  have  made  out 
that  to  plenty  of  graduates,  or  of  the  graduating, 
nothing  in  the  nature  of  such  appearances  attached. 
I  think  of  our  father  moreover  as  no  less  affected 
by  a  like  impression;  so  extremely,  so  immensely 
disposed  do  I  see  him  to  generalise  his  eldest  son's 
gifts  as  by  the  largest,  fondest  synthesis,  and  not 
so  much  proceed  upon  them  in  any  one  direction 
as  proceed  from  them,  as  it  were,  in  all. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

Little  as  such  a  view  might  have  lent  itself 
to  application,  my  brother's  searching  discovery 
during  the  summer  of  1861  that  his  vocation  was 
not  "after  all"  in  the  least  satisfyingly  for  Art, 
took  on  as  a  prompt  sequel  the  recognition  that 
it  was  quite  positively  and  before  everything  for 
Science,  physical  Science,  strenuous  Science  in 
all  its  exactitude;  with  the  opportunity  again 
forthcoming  to  put  his  freshness  of  faith  to  the 
test.  I  had  presumed  to  rejoice  before  at  his 
adoption  of  the  studio  life,  that  offering  as  well 
possible  contacts  for  myself;  and  yet  I  recall 
no  pang  for  his  tergiversation,  there  being  nothing 
he  mightn't  have  done  at  this  or  at  any  other 
moment  that  I  shouldn't  have  felt  as  inevitable 
and  found  in  my  sense  of  his  previous  age  some 
happy  and  striking  symptom  or  pledge  of.  As 
certain  as  that  he  had  been  all  the  while  "artistic" 
did  it  thus  appear  that  he  had  been  at  the  same 
time  quite  otherwise  inquiring  too  —  addicted  to 
"experiments"  and  the  consumption  of  chemi 
cals,  the  transfusion  of  mysterious  liquids  from 
glass  to  glass  under  exposure  to  lambent  flame, 
the  cultivation  of  stained  fingers,  the  establish 
ment  and  the  transport,  in  our  wanderings,  of 
galvanic  batteries,  the  administration  to  all  he 
could  persuade  of  electric  shocks,  the  maintenance 
of  marine  animals  in  splashy  aquaria,  the  practice 
of  photography  in  the  room  I  for  a  while  shared 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     123 

with  him  at  Boulogne,  with  every  stern  reality 
of  big  cumbrous  camera,  prolonged  exposure, 
exposure  mostly  of  myself,  darkened  develop 
ment,  also  interminable,  and  ubiquitous  brown 
blot.  Then  there  had  been  also  the  constant, 
as  I  fearfully  felt  it,  the  finely  speculative  and 
boldly  disinterested  absorption  of  curious  drugs. 
No  livelier  remembrance  have  I  of  our  early 
years  together  than  this  inveteracy,  often  ap 
palling  to  a  nature  so  incurious  as  mine  in  that 
direction,  of  his  interest  in  the  "queer"  or  the 
incalculable  effects  of  things.  There  was  appar 
ently  for  him  no  possible  effect  whatever  that 
mightn't  be  more  or  less  rejoiced  in  as  such  —  all 
exclusive  of  its  relation  to  other  things  than 
merely  knowing.  There  recurs  to  me  withal  the 
shamelessness  of  my  own  indifference  —  at  which 
I  also,  none  the  less,  I  think,  wondered  a  little; 
as  if  by  so  much  as  it  hadn't  been  given  me  to 
care  for  visibly  provoked  or  engineered  phenom 
ena,  by  that  same  amount  was  I  open  to  those 
of  the  mysteriously  or  insidiously  aggressive,  the 
ambushed  or  suffered  sort.  Vivid  to  me  in  any 
case  is  still  the  sense  of  how  quite  shiningly  light, 
as  an  activity  and  an  appeal,  he  had  seemed  to 
make  everything  he  gave  himself  to;  so  that  at 
first,  until  the  freshness  of  it  failed,  he  flung  this 
iridescent  mantle  of  interest  over  the  then  so 
grey  and  scant  little  scene  of  the  Harvard  (the 


124    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

Lawrence)  Scientific  School,  where  in  the  course 
of  the  months  I  had  had  a  glimpse  or  two  of 
him  at  work.     Early  in  the  autumn  of  1861  he 
went  up  from  Newport  to   Cambridge  to  enter 
that    institution;    in    which    thin    current   rather 
than  in  the  ostensibly  more  ample  began  to  flow 
his  long  connection  with  Harvard,  gathering  in 
time  so  many  affluents.     His  letters  from  Cam 
bridge   during   the   next   couple   of   years,   many 
of  them  before  me  now,  breathe,  I  think,  all  the 
experience  the  conditions  could  have  begotten  at 
the    best;    they    mark    the    beginning    of    those 
vivacities  and  varieties  of  intellectual  and  moral 
reaction  which  were  for  the  rest  of  his  life  to  be 
the    more    immeasurably   candid   and   vivid,   the 
more  numerous  above  all,  and  the  more  interesting 
and  amusing,   the  closer  view  one  had  of  him. 
That  of  a  certainty;  yet  these  familiar  pages  of 
youth  testify  most  of  all  for  me  perhaps  to  the 
forces   of   amenity   and   spontaneity,   the   happy 
working  of  all  relations,  in  our  family  life.     In 
such  parts  of  them  as  I  may  cite  this  will  shine 
sufficiently  through  —  and  I  shall  take  for  granted 
thus    the    interest    of    small    matters    that    have 
perhaps  but  that  reflected  light  to  show.    It  is 
in   a   letter  to   myself,  of  that  September,  dated 
"Drear   and   Chill   Abode,"   that   he   appears   to 
have    celebrated    the    first    steps    of    his    initia 
tion. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    125 

Sweet  was  your  letter  and  grateful  to  my  eyes.  I 
had  gone  in  a  mechanical  way  to  the  P.O.  not  hoping 
for  anything  (though  "on  espere  alors  qu'on  desespere 
toujours,")  and,  finding  nothing,  was  turning  heavily 
away  when  a  youth  modestly  tapped  me  and,  holding 
out  an  envelope  inscribed  in  your  well-known  char 
acter,  said,  "Mr.  J.,  this  was  in  our  box!"  'Twas  the 
young  Pascoe,  the  joy  of  his  mother  —  but  the  graphic 
account  I  read  in  the  letter  he  gave  me  of  the  sor 
row  of  my  mother  almost  made  me  shed  tears  on  the 
floor  of  the  P.O.  Not  that  on  reflection  I  should 
dream —  — !  for  reflection  shows  me  a  future  in  which 
she  shall  regard  my  vacation  visits  as  "on  the  whole" 
rather  troublesome  than  otherwise;  or  at  least  when 
she  shall  feel  herself  as  blest  in  the  trouble  I  spare  her 
when  absent  as  in  the  glow  of  pride  and  happiness 
she  feels  at  the  sight  of  me  when  present.  But  she 
needn't  fear  I  can  ever  think  of  her  when  absent  with 
such  equanimity.  I  oughtn't  to  "joke  on  such  a 
serious  subject,"  as  Bobby  would  say  though;  for  I 
have  had  several  pangs  since  being  here  at  the  thought 
of  all  I  have  left  behind  at  Newport  —  especially 
gushes  of  feeling  about  the  place.  I  haven't  for  one 
minute  had  the  feeling  of  being  at  home  here.  Some 
thing  in  my  quarters  precludes  the  possibility  of  it, 
though  what  this  is  I  don't  suppose  I  can  describe  to 
you. 

As  I  write  now  even,  writing  itself  being  a  cosy 
cheerful-looking  amusement,  and  an  argand  gas-burner 
with  a  neat  green  shade  merrily  singing  beside  me,  I 
still  feel  unsettled.  I  write  on  a  round  table  in  the 
middle  of  the  room,  with  a  fearful  red  and  black  cloth. 
Before  me  I  see  another  such-covered  table  of  oblong 
shape  against  the  wall,  capped  by  a  cheap  looking-glass 
and  flanked  by  two  windows,  curtainless  and  bleak, 
whose  shades  of  linen  flout  the  air  as  the  sportive  wind 


126     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

impels  them.  To  the  left  are  two  other  such  windows, 
with  a  horse-hair  sofa  between  them,  and  at  my  back 
a  fifth  window  and  a  vast  wooden  mantel-piece  with 
nothing  to  relieve  its  nakedness  but  a  large  cast,  much 
plumbago'd,  of  a  bust  of  Franklin.  On  my  right  the 
Bookcase,  imposing  and  respectable  with  its  empty 
drawers  and  with  my  little  array  of  printed  wisdom 
covering  nearly  one  of  the  shelves.  I  hear  the  people 
breathe  as  they  go  past  in  the  street,  and  the  roll  and 
jar  of  the  horse-cars  is  terrific.  I  have  accordingly 
engaged  the  other  room  from  Mrs.  Pascoe,  with  the 
little  sleeping-room  upstairs.  It  looks  infinitely  more 
cheerful  than  this,  and  if  I  don't  find  the  grate  suffi 
cient  I  can  easily  have  a  Franklin  stove  put  up.  But 
she  says  the  grate  will  make  an  oven  of  it.  .  .  .  John 
Ropes  I  met  the  other  day  at  Harry  Quincy's  room, 
and  was  very  much  pleased  with  him.  Don't  fail  to 
send  on  Will  Temple's  letters  to  him  and  to  Herbert 
Mason,  which  I  left  in  one  of  the  of  the  library's  man 
telpiece  jars,  to  use  the  Portuguese  idiom.  Storrow 
Higginson  has  been  very  kind  to  me,  making  enquiries 
about  tables  etc.  We  went  together  this  morning  to 
the  house  of  the  Curator  of  the  Gray  collection  of 
Engravings,  which  is  solemnly  to  unfold  its  glories  to 
me  to-morrow.  He  is  a  most  serious  stately  German 
gentleman,  Mr.  Thies  by  name,  fully  sensible  of  the 
deep  vital  importance  of  his  treasures  and  evidently 
thinking  a  visit  to  them  a  great  affair  —  to  me.  Had 
I  known  how  great,  how  tremendous  and  formal,  I 
hardly  think  I  should  have  ventured  to  call.  Tom 
Ward  pays  me  a  visit  almost  every  evening.  Poor 
Tom  seems  a-cold  too.  His  deafness  keeps  him  from 
making  acquaintances.  Professor  Eliot,  at  the  School, 
is  a  fine  fellow,  I  suspect;  a  man  who  if  he  resolves  to 
do  a  thing  won't  be  prevented.  I  find  analysis  very 
interesting  so  far!  The  Library  has  a  reading-room, 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    127 

where  they  take  all  the  magazines;  so  I  shan't  want  for 
the  Rev.  des  2  M.  I  remain  with  unalterable  senti 
ments  of  devotion  ever,  my  dear  H.,  your  Big  Brother 
Bill. 

This  record  of  further  impressions  closely  and 
copiously  followed. 

Your  letter  this  morning  was  such  a  godsend  that  I 
hasten  to  respond  a  line  or  two,  though  I  have  no 
business  to  —  for  I  have  a  fearful  lesson  to-morrow  and 
am  going  to  Boston  to-night  to  hear  Agassiz  lecture 
(12  lectures  on  "Methods  in  Nat.  Hist."),  so  that  I  will 
only  tell  you  that  I  am  very  well  and  my  spirits  just 
getting  good.  Miss  Upham's  table  is  much  pleasanter 
than  the  other.  Professor  F.  J.  Child  is  a  great  joker 
-  he's  a  little  flaxen-headed  boy  of  about  40.  There 
is  a  nice  old  lady  boarder,  another  man  of  about  50, 
of  aristocratic  bearing,  who  interests  me  much,  and 
3  intelligent  students.  At  the  other  table  was  no 
conversation  at  all;  the  fellows  had  that  American 
solemnity,  called  each  other  Sir,  etc.  I  cannot  tell  you, 
dearest  Mother,  how  your  account  of  your  Sunday 
dinner  and  of  your  feelings  thereat  brought  tears  to 
my  eyes.  Give  Father  my  ardent  love  and  cover 
with  kisses  the  round  fair  face  of  the  most  kiss- 
worthy  Alice.  Then  kiss  the  Aunt  till  you  get  tired, 
and  get  all  the  rest  of  them  to  kiss  you  till  you  cry 
hold  enough! 

This  morning  as  I  was  busy  over  the  10th  page  of  a 
letter  to  Wilky  in  he  popped  and  made  my  labour  of 
no  account.  I  had  intended  to  go  and  see  him  yester 
day,  but  found  Edward  Emerson  and  Tom  Ward  were 
going,  and  so  thought  he  would  have  too  much  of  a 
good  thing.  But  he  walked  over  this  morning  with, 
or  rather  without  them,  for  he  went  astray  and  arrived 


128    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

very  hot  and  dusty.  I  gave  him  a  bath  and  took  him 
to  dinner,  and  he  is  now  gone  to  see  Andrew  Robeson 
and  E.  E.  His  plump  corpusculus  looks  as  always.  I 
write  in  my  new  parlour  whither  I  moved  yesterday. 
You  have  no  idea  what  an  improvement  it  is  on  the 
old  affair  —  worth  double  the  cost,  and  the  little  bed 
room  under  the  roof  is  perfectly  delicious,  with  a 
charming  outlook  on  little  back  yards  with  trees  and 
pretty  old  brick  walls.  The  sun  is  upon  this  room 
from  earliest  dawn  till  late  in  the  afternoon  —  a  capi 
tal  thing  in  winter.  I  like  Miss  Upham's  very  much. 
Dark  "aristocratic"  dining-room,  with  royal  cheer. 
"Fish,  roast  beef,  veal  cutlets,  pigeons!"  says  the 
splendid,  tall,  noble-looking,  white-armed,  black-eyed 
Juno  of  a  handmaid  as  you  sit  down.  And  for  dessert 
a  choice  of  three,  three,  darling  Mother,  of  the  most 
succulent,  unctuous  (no,  not  unctuous,  unless  you 
imagine  a  celestial  unction  without  the  oil)  pie-like 
confections,  always  2  platesful  —  my  eye!  She  has 
an  admirable  chemical,  not  mechanical,  combination 
of  cake  and  jam  and  cream  which  I  recommend  to 
Mother  if  she  is  ever  at  a  loss;  though  there  is  no 
well-stored  pantry  like  that  of  good  old  Kay  Street, 
or  if  there  is  it  exists  not  for  miserable  me. 

This  chemical  analysis  is  so  bewildering  at  first  that 
I  am  "muddled  and  bet"  and  have  to  employ  almost 
all  my  time  reading  up.  Agassiz  is  evidently  a  great 
favourite  with  his  Boston  audience  and  feels  it  himself. 
But  he's  an  admirable  earnest  lecturer,  clear  as  day, 
and  his  accent  is  most  fascinating.  Jeffries  Wyman's 
lectures  on  Comp.  Anatomy  of  Verts,  promise  to  be 
very  good;  prosy  perhaps  a  little  and  monotonous,  but 
plain  and  well-arranged  and  nourris.  Eliot  I  have  not 
seen  much  more  of;  I  don't  believe  he  is  a  very  accom 
plished  chemist,  but  can't  tell  yet.  We  are  only  about 
12  in  the  Laboratory,  so  that  we  have  a  very  cosy 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     129 

time.  I  expect  to  have  a  winter  of  "crowded  life." 
I  can  be  as  independent  as  I  please,  and  want  to  live 
regardless  of  the  good  or  bad  opinion  of  every  one. 
I  shall  have  a  splendid  chance  to  try,  I  know,  and  I 
know  too  that  the  native  hue  of  resolution  has  never 
been  of  very  great  shade  in  me  hitherto.  I  am  sure 
that  that  feeling  is  a  right  one,  and  I  mean  to  live 
according  to  it  if  I  can.  If  I  do  so  I  think  I  shall  turn 
out  all  right. 

I  stopped  this  letter  before  tea,  when  Wilky  the 
rosy-gilled  and  Frank  Higginson  came  in.  I  now  re 
sume  it  by  the  light  of  a  taper  and  that  of  the  moon. 
Wilky  read  H.'s  letter  and  amused  me  "metch"  by  his 
naive  interpretation  of  Mother's  most  rational  request 
that  I  should  "keep  a  memorandum  of  all  moneys  I 
receive  from  Father."  He  thought  it  was  that  she 
might  know  exactly  what  sums  her  prodigal  philoso 
pher  really  gives  out,  and  that  mistrust  of  his  gener 
osity  caused  it.  The  phrase  has  a  little  sound  that 
way,  as  H.  subtly  framed  it,  I  confess! 

The  first  few  days,  the  first  week  here,  I  really  didn't 
know  what  to  do  with  myself  or  how  to  fill  my  time. 
I  felt  as  if  turned  out  of  doors.  I  then  received  H.'s 
and  Mother's  letters.  Never  before  did  I  know  what 
mystic  depths  of  rapture  lay  concealed  within  that 
familiar  word.  Never  did  the  same  being  look  so  like 
two  different  ones  as  I  going  in  and  out  of  the  P.  O.  if 
I  bring  a  letter  with  me.  Gloomily,  with  despair 
written  on  my  leaden  brow  I  stalk  the  street  along 
towards  the  P.  O.,  women,  children  and  students  in 
voluntarily  shrinking  against  the  wall  as  I  pass  —  thus,1 
as  if  the  curse  of  Cain  were  stamped  upon  my  front. 
But  when  I  come  out  with  a  letter  an  immense  con 
course  of  people  generally  attends  me  to  my  lodging, 
attracted  by  my  excited  wild  gestures  and  look. 

1  Expressive  drawing  alas  irreproducible. 


130    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

Christmas  being  sparely  kept  in  the  New 
England  of  those  days,  William  passed  that  of 
1861,  as  a  Cambridge  letter  of  the  afternoon 
indicates,  without  opportunity  for  a  seasonable 
dash  to  Newport,  but  with  such  compensations, 
nearer  at  hand  as  are  here  exhibited.  Our 
brother  Wilky,  I  should  premise,  had  been  placed 
with  the  youngest  of  us,  Bob,  for  companion,  at 
the  "co-educational"  school  then  but  a  short 
time  previously  established  by  Mr.  F.  B.  Sanborn 
at  Concord,  Massachusetts  —  and  of  which  there 
will  be  more  to  say.  "Tom"  Ward,  already 
mentioned  and  who,  having  left  the  Concord 
school  shortly  before,  had  just  entered  Harvard, 
was  quickly  to  become  William's  intimate,  ap 
proved  and  trusted  friend;  the  diversion  of 
whose  patient  originality,  whose  intellectual  in 
dependence,  ability  and  curiosity  from  science 
and  free  inquiry  to  hereditary  banking  —  con 
sequent  on  the  position  of  the  paternal  Samuel 
Gray  Ward  as  the  representative  for  many  years 
in  the  United  States  of  the  house  of  Baring 
Brothers  —  he  from  the  first  much  regretted:  the 
more  pertinently  doubtless  that  this  companion 
was  of  a  family  "connected"  with  ours  through 
an  intermarriage,  Gus  Barker,  as  Mrs.  S.  G. 
Ward's  nephew,  being  Tom's  first  cousin  as  well 
as  ours,  and  such  links  still  counting,  in  that  age 
of  comparatively  less  developed  ramifications, 


~fi  sttty 
a#wuc£ct 

j%te<U/£Zt £&li 


>  ^*: 


leaf  from  the  letter  quoted  on  page  129. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     131 

when  sympathy  and  intercourse  kept  pace  as  it 
was  kept  between  our  pairs  of  parents. 

I  have  been  in  Boston  the  whole  blest  morning, 
toted  round  by  the  Wards,  who  had  as  usual  asked  me 
to  dine  with  them.  I  had  happily  provided  myself 
with  an  engagement  here  for  all  such  emergencies,  but, 
as  is  my  sportive  wont,  I  befooled  Tom  with  divers 
answers,  and  finally  let  him  believe  I  would  come 
(having  refused  several  dazzling  chances  for  the  pur 
pose)  supposing  of  course  I  should  see  him  here  yes 
terday  at  Miss  Upham's  board  and  disabuse  him. 
But  the  young  viper  went  home  right  after  breakfast 
-  so  I  had  to  go  into  Boston  this  morning  and  explain. 
Wilky  had  come  up  from  Concord  to  dine  in  said 
Commonwealth  Avenue,  and  I,  as  it  turned  out,  found 
myself  in  for  following  the  innocent  lamb  Lily  up  and 
down  the  town  for  two  hours,  to  hold  bundles  and 
ring  bells  for  her;  Wilky  and  Tom  having  vanished 
from  the  scene.  Clear  sharp  cold  morning,  thermom 
eter  5  degrees  at  sunrise,  and  the  streets  covered 
with  one  glare  of  ice.  I  had  thick  smooth  shoes  and 
went  sliding  off  like  an  avalanche  every  three  steps, 
while  she,  having  india-rubbers  and  being  a  Bos- 
tonian,  went  ahead  like  a  swan.  I  had  among  other 
things  to  keep  her  bundles  from  harm,  to  wipe  away 
every  three  minutes  the  trembling  jewel  with  which 
the  cold  would  with  persistent  kindness  ornament  my 
coral  nose;  to  keep  a  hypocritic  watchful  eye  on  her 
movements  lest  she  fall;  to  raise  my  hat  gracefully 
to  more  and  more  of  her  acquaintances  every  block; 
to  skate  round  and  round  embracing  lamp-posts  and 
door-scrapers  by  the  score  to  keep  from  falling,  as  well 
as  to  avoid  serving  old  lady-promenaders  in  the  same 
way;  to  cut  capers  4  feet  high  at  the  rate  of  20  a 
second,  every  now  and  then,  for  the  same  purpose;  to 


132    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

keep  from  scooting  off  down  hills  and  round  corners 
as  fast  as  my  able-bodied  companion;  often  to  do 
all  these  at  once  and  then  fall  lickety-bang  like  a 
chandelier,  but  when  so  to  preserve  an  expression  of 
placid  beatitude  or  easy  nonchalance  despite  the  raging 
fiend  within:  oh  it  beggars  description!  When  finally 
it  was  over  and  I  stood  alone  I  shook  my  companion's 
dust  from  my  feet  and,  biting  my  beard  with  rage, 
sware  a  mighty  oath  unto  high  heaven  that  I  would 
never,  while  reason  held  her  throne  in  this  distracted 
orb,  never  NEVER,  by  word,  look  or  gesture  and  this 
without  mental  reservation,  acknowledge  a  "young 
lady"  as  a  human  being.  The  false  and  rotten  spawn 
might  die  before  I  would  wink  to  save  it.  No  more 
Parties  now!  —  at  last  I  am  a  Man,  etc.,  etc.! 

My  enthusiasm  ran  very  high  for  a  few  minutes,  but 
I  suddenly  saw  that  I  was  a  great  ass  and  became 
sobered  instantly,  so  that  on  the  whole  I  am  better  for 
the  circumstance,  being  a  sadder  and  a  wiser  man.  I 
also  went  to  the  Tappans5  and  gave  the  children  slight 
presents;  then,  coming  home  to  my  venal  board,  be 
haved  very  considerately  and  paternally  to  a  young 
lady  who  sat  next  to  me,  but  with  a  shade  of  subdued 
melancholy  in  my  manner  which  could  not  have  been 
noticed  at  the  breakfast-table.  Many  times  and  bit 
terly  to-day  have  I  thought  of  home  and  lamented 
that  I  should  have  to  be  away  at  this  merry  Christ- 
mastide  from  my  rare  family;  wondering,  with  Wilky, 
if  they  were  missing  us  as  we  miss  them.  And  now 
as  I  sit  in  the  light  of  my  kerosene,  with  the  fire  quietly 
consuming  in  the  grate  and  the  twilight  on  the  snow 
outside  and  the  melancholy  old-fashioned  strains  of 
the  piano  dimly  rising  from  below,  I  see  in  vision  those 
at  home  just  going  in  to  dinner;  my  aged,  silvered 
Mother  leaning  on  the  arm  of  her  stalwart  yet  flexible 
H.,  merry  and  garrulous  as  ever,  my  blushing  Aunt 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     133 

with  her  old  wild  beauty  still  hanging  about  her, 
my  modest  Father  with  his  rippling  raven  locks,  the 
genial  auld  Rob  and  the  mysterious  Alice,  all  rise 
before  me,  a  glorified  throng;  but  two  other  forms, 
one  tall,  intellectual,  swarthy,  with  curved  nose  and 
eagle  eye,  the  other  having  breadth  rather  than  depth, 
but  a  goodly  morsel  too,  are  wanting  to  complete  the 
harmonious  whole.  Eftsoons  they  vanish  and  I  am 
again  alone,  alone  —  what  pathos  in  the  word !  I 
have  two  companions  though,  most  all  the  time  - 
remorse  and  despair!  T.  S.  Perry  took  their  place 
for  a  little,  and  to-day  they  have  not  come  back.  T. 
S.  seemed  to  enjoy  his  visit  very  much.  It  was  very 
pleasant  for  me  to  have  him;  his  rustic  wonder  at  the 
commonest  sights  was  most  ludicrous,  and  his  conver 
sation  most  amusing  and  instructive. 

The  place  here  improves  to  me  as  I  go  on  living  in 
it,  and  if  I  study  with  Agassiz  4  or  5  years  there  is 
nothing  I  should  like  better  than  to  have  you  all  with 
me,  regular  and  comfortable.  I  enclose  another  adver 
tisement  of  a  house  —  but  which  would  be  too  small 
for  us,  I  believe,  though  it  might  be  looked  at.  I 
had  a  long  talk  with  one  of  A.'s  students  the  other 
night,  and  saw  for  the  first  time  how  a  naturalist  may 
feel  about  his  trade  exactly  as  an  artist  does  about  his. 
For  instance  Agassiz  would  rather  take  wholly  unin- 
structed  people --"for  he  has  to  unteach  them  all 
they  have  learnt."  He  doesn't  let  them  so  much  as 
look  into  a  book  for  a  long  while;  what  they  learn 
they  must  learn  for  themselves  and  be  masters  of  it  all. 
The  consequence  is  he  makes  Naturalists  of  them  - 
doesn't  merely  cram  them;  and  this  student  (he  had 
been  there  2  years)  said  he  felt  ready  to  go  anywhere 
in  the  world  now  with  nothing  but  his  notebook  and 
study  out  anything  quite  alone.  A.  must  be  a  great 
teacher.  Chemistry  comes  on  tolerably,  but  not  so 


134     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

fast  as  I  expected.  I  am  pretty  slow  with  my  sub 
stances,  having  done  but  12  since  Thanksgiving  and 
having  38  more  to  do  before  the  end  of  the  term. 

Comment  on  the  abundance,  the  gaiety  and 
drollery,  the  generous  play  of  vision  and  fancy  in 
all  this,  would  seem  so  needless  as  to  be  almost 
officious,  were  not  the  commentator  constantly, 
were  he  not  infinitely,  arrested  and  reminded 
and  solicited;  which  is  at  once  his  advantage 
and  his  embarrassment.  Such  a  letter,  at  all 
events,  read  over  with  the  general  key,  touches  its 
contemporary  scene  and  hour  into  an  intensity 
of  life  for  him;  making  indeed  the  great  sign  of 
that  life  my  brother's  signal  vivacity  and  cordi 
ality,  his  endless  spontaneity  of  mind.  Every 
thing  in  it  is  characteristic  of  the  genius  and 
expressive  of  the  mood,  and  not  least,  of  course, 
the  pleasantry  of  paradox,  the  evocation  of  each 
familiar  image  by  its  vivid  opposite.  Our  mother, 
e.g.,  was  not  at  that  time,  nor  for  a  good  while 
yet,  so  venerably  "silvered";  our  handsome- 
headed  father  had  lost,  occipitally,  long  before, 
all  pretence  to  raven  locks,  certainly  to  the  effect 
of  their  "rippling";  the  beauty  of  our  admirable 
aunt  was  as  happily  alien  either  to  wildness  or 
to  the  "hanging"  air  as  it  could  very  well  be; 
the  "mystery"  of  our  young  sister  consisted  all 
in  the  candour  of  her  natural  bloom,  even  if  at 
the  same  time  of  her  lively  intelligence;  and 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     135 

H.'s  mirth  and  garrulity  appear  to  have  repre 
sented  for  the  writer  the  veriest  ironic  transla 
tion  of  something  in  that  youth,  I  judge,  not  a 
little  mildly -- though  oh  so  mildly!  —  morose  or 
anxiously  mute.  To  the  same  tune  the  aquiline 
in  his  own  nose  heroically  derides  the  slightly 
relaxed  line  of  that  feature;  and  our  brother 
Wilky's  want  of  physical  "depth"  is  a  glance 
at  a  different  proportion.  Of  a  like  tinge  of 
pleasantry,  I  may  add,  is  the  imputation  of  the 
provincial  gape  to  our  friend  T.  S.  Perry,  of 
Newport  birth  and  unintermitted  breeding,  with 
whom  we  were  to  live  so  much  in  the  years  to 
come,  and  who  was  then  on  the  eve  of  entering 
Harvard  —  his  face  already  uninterruptedly  turned 
to  that  love  of  letters,  that  practice  of  them  by 
dauntless  and  inordinate,  though  never  at  all 
vulgarly  resonant,  absorption  which  was  to  con 
stitute  in  itself  the  most  disinterested  of  careers. 
I  had  myself  felt  him  from  the  first  an  exemplary, 
at  once,  and  a  discouraging  friend;  he  had  let 
himself  loose  in  the  world  of  books,  pressed  and 
roamed  through  the  most  various  literatures  and 
the  most  voluminous  authors,  with  a  stride  that, 
as  it  carried  him  beyond  all  view,  left  me  dismayed 
and  helpless  at  the  edge  of  the  forest,  where  I 
listened  wistfully  but  unemulously  to  the  far-off 
crash  from  within  of  his  felled  timber,  the  clearing 
of  whole  spaces  or  periods  shelf  by  shelf  or  great 


136    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

tree  by  tree.  The  brother-in-law  of  John  La 
Farge,  he  had  for  us  further,  with  that  reviving 
consciousness  of  American  annals  which  the  War 
was  at  once  so  rudely  and  so  insidiously  to 
quicken  in  us,  the  glamour  of  his  straight  descent 
from  the  Commodores  Perry  of  the  Lake  Erie  in 
the  war  of  1812,  respectively,  and  of  the  por 
tentous  penetration  of  Japan  just  after  the  mid- 
century,  and  his  longer-drawn  but  equally  direct 
and  so  clean  and  comfortable  affiliation  to  the 
great  Benjamin  Franklin:  as  these  things  at 
least  seemed  to  me  under  my  habit  (too  musing 
and  brooding  certainly  to  have  made  for  light 
loquacity)  of  pressing  every  wind-borne  particle 
of  personal  history  —  once  the  persons  were  only 
other  enough  from  myself  -  -  into  the  service  of 
what  I  would  fain  have  called  picture  or,  less 
explicitly,  less  formulatedly,  romance. 

These,  however,  are  but  too  fond  insistences, 
and  what  mainly  bears  pointing  out  is  my 
brother's  already  restless  reach  forth  to  some 
new  subject  of  study.  He  had  but  lately  ad 
dressed  himself,  not  without  confidence,  to  such 
an  investigation  of  Chemistry  as  he  might  become 
conscious  of  a  warrant  for,  yet  the  appeal  of 
Agassiz's  great  authority,  so  much  in  the  air  of 
the  Cambridge  of  that  time,  found  him  at  once 
responsive;  it  opened  up  a  world,  the  world  of 
sentient  life,  in  the  light  of  which  Chemistry  faded. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    137 

He  had  not,  however,  for  the  moment  done  with 
it;  and  what  I  at  any  rate  find  most  to  the  point 
in  the  pages  before  me  is  the  charm  of  their  so 
witnessing  to  the  geniality  and  harmony  of  our 
family  life,  exquisite  as  I  look  back  on  it  and 
reflected  almost  as  much  in  any  one  passage  taken 
at  hazard  as  in  any  other.  He  had  apparently, 
at  the  date  of  the  following,  changed  his  lodging. 

President  Felton's  death  has  been  the  great  event 
of  the  week  —  two  funerals  and  I  don't  know  how 
many  prayers  and  sermons.  To-day  I  thought  I 
would  go  to  University  chapel  for  the  sake  of  variety 
and  hear  Dr.  Peabody's  final  word  on  him  —  and  a 
very  long  and  lugubrious  one  it  was.  The  prayer  was 
a  prolonged  moan  in  which  the  death  (not  in  its  con 
sequences,  but  in  itself)  was  treated  as  a  great  calam 
ity,  and  the  whole  eulogy  was  almost  ridiculously 
overcharged.  What  was  most  disagreeable  through 
out  was  the  wailing  tones,  not  a  bit  that  of  simple 
pagan  grief  at  the  loss  —  which  would  have  been 
honest;  but  a  whine  consciously  put  on  as  from  a 
sense  of  duty,  and  a  whine  at  nothing  definite  either, 
only  a  purposeless  clothing  of  all  his  words  in  tears. 
The  whole  style  of  the  performance  was  such  that  I 
have  concluded  to  have  nothing  more  to  do  with 
funerals  till  they  improve. 

The  walking  here  has  been  terrible  with  ice  or  slush 
these  many  weeks,  but  over  head  celestial.  No  new 
developments  in  this  house.  The  maniac  sometimes 
chills  my  very  marrow  by  hoarsely  whispering  outside 
the  door,  "Gulielmo,  Gulielmo!"  Old  Sweetser  sits 
in  his  dressing-gown  smoking  his  pipe  all  day  in  a  little 
uncomfortable  old  bathroom  next  door  to  me.  He  may 


138    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

with  truth  be  called  a  queer  cuss.  The  young  ladies 
have  that  very  nasty  immodest  habit  of  hustling  them 
selves  out  of  sight  precipitately  whenever  I  appear. 

I  dined  with  Mrs. yesterday  all  alone.     She  was 

quite  sick,  very  hoarse,  and  he  was  in  the  country,  so 
that  on  the  whole  it  was  a  great  bore.  She  is  very 
clumsy  in  her  way  of  doing  things,  and  her  invitation 
to  me  was  for  the  wife  of  an  artist  —  not  artistic ! 

I  am  now  studying  organic  Chemistry.  It  will 
probably  shock  Mother  to  hear  that  I  yesterday  de 
stroyed  a  pockethandkerchief  —  but  it  was  an  old  one 
and  I  converted  it  into  some  sugar  which  though 
rather  brown  is  very  good.  I  believe  I  forgot  to  tell 
you  that  I  am  shorn  of  my  brightest  ornament.  That 
solitary  hirsute  jewel  which  lent  such  a  manly  and 
martial  aspect  to  my  visage  is  gone,  and  the  place 
thereof  is  naked.  I  don't  think  anyone  will  know 
the  difference,  and  moreover  it  is  not  dead,  it  only 
sleeps  and  will  some  day  rise  phoenix-like  from  its 
ashes  with  tenfold  its  former  beauty.  When  Father 
comes  will  he  please  bring  Ganot's  Physique  if  H. 
doesn't  want  it? 

In  none  of  these  earlier  communications  from 
Cambridge  is  the  element  of  affectionate  pleas 
antry  more  at  play  than  in  those  addressed  to 
his  sister. 

Charmante  jeune  fille,  I  find  the  Tappans  really 
expected  me  to  bring  you  to  them  and  were  much  dis 
appointed  at  my  failure.  Ellen  has  grown  very  fat 
and  big.  Mary  calls  everybody  "horrid."  Lyly 
Barker  is  with  the  Wards.  I  haven't  seen  her  yet, 
but  shall  do  so  on  Saturday,  when  I  am  also  to  dine 
with  the  Hunts.  I  hope  your  neuralgia,  or  whatever 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    139 

you  may  believe  the  thing  was,  has  gone  and  that  you 
are  'back  at  school  instead  of  languishing  and  lolling 
about  the  house.  I  send  you  herewith  a  portrait  of 
Prof.  Eliot,  a  very  fair  likeness,  to  grace  your  book 
withal.  Write  me  whenever  you  have  the  slightest 
or  most  fleeting  inclination  to  do  so.  If  you  have  only 
one  sentence  to  say,  don't  grudge  paper  and  stamps 
for  it.  You  don't  know  how  much  good  you  may  do 
me  at  an  appropriate  time  by  a  little  easy  scratching 
of  your  graceful  nimble  pen. 

In  another  apostrophe  to  the  same  correspon 
dent,  at  the  same  season,  his  high  spirits  throw 
off  the  bonds  of  the  vernacular. 

Est-ce  que  tu  songes  jamais  a  moi  comme  moi  je 
songe  a  toi?  —  oh  je  crois  bien  que  non!  Maintes  fois 
dans  la  journee  I'image  d'une  espece  d'ange  vetue  de 
blanc  avec  de  longs  boucles  noirs  qui  encadrent  une 
figure  telle  que  la  plupart  des  mortels  ne  font  que  1'en- 
trevoir  dans  leur  reves,  s'impose  a  mes  sens  ravis; 
creature  longue  et  fluette  qui  se  dispose  a  se  coucher 
dans  une  petite  chambrette  verte  ou  le  gaz  fait  un 
grand  jour.  Eh,  oua,  oua,  oua !  c'est  a  f aire  mourir  de 
douleur.  Mais  je  parie  que  tout  de  meme  pas  une 
etincelle  ne  vibre  pour  moi  dans  les  fibres  de  ton  cceur 
endurci.  Helas,  oublie  de  mes  parents  et  de  mes 
semblables,  je  ne  vois,  ou  que  je  regarde,  qu'un  abime 
de  desespoir,  un  gouffre  noir  et  peuple  de  demons,  qui 
tot  ou  tard  va  m'engloutir.  Tu  ne  m'ecris  jamais 
sauf  pour  me  soutirer  des  objets  de  luxe.  La  vaste 
mere  me  deteste,  il  n'y  a  que  le  frere  qui  me  reste  at 
tache,  et  lui  par  esprit  d'opposition  plus  que  par  autre 
chose.  Eh  mon  Dieu,  que  vais-je  devenir?  En  tout 
cas  je  vais  clore  cette  lettre,  qui  s'est  allongee  malgre 
moi.  Ton  frere,  James  William. 


140    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

Of  the  same  bright  complexion  is  this  report, 
addressed  to  his  parents,  of  the  change  of  lodging 
already  noted. 

The  presence  of  the  Tweedys  has  been  most  agree 
able  and  has  contributed  in  no  small  degree  to  break 
the  shock  of  removal  to  these  new  rooms,  which  are 
not  near  so  cosy  as  the  old;  especially  with  the  smok 
ing  of  my  stove,  which  went  on  all  the  first  two  days. 
That  has  been  stopped,  however,  and  the  only  trouble 
is  now  to  get  the  fire  alight  at  all.  I  have  generally 
to  start  it  3  or  4  times,  and  the  removal  of  the  ma 
terial  of  each  failure  from  the  grate  is  a  fearful  busi 
ness.  I  have  also  to  descend  to  the  cellar  myself  to 
get  my  coal,  and  my  "hod,"  as  Ma  Sweetser,  my  land 
lady,  calls  it,  not  being  very  much  bigger  than  a  milk- 
pitcher,  doesn't  add  to  the  charm.  The  coal  is  apt 
to  drop  on  the  stairs,  and  I  have  to  pick  it  all  up.  At 
present  the  stove  fills  the  room  with  a  nephitic  and 
pestilential  gas,  so  that  I  have  to  keep  the  window  open. 
I  went  last  night  with  the  Tweedys  to  the  concert  for 
which  they  came  up,  and  with  them  this  morning  to 
hear  Wendell  Phillips.  This  Sweetser  family  is  worthy 
of  Dickens.  It  consists  of  a  Mr.  and  Miss  S.,  Mr. 
S.'s  three  gushing  girls,  a  parrot  and  a  maniac.  The 
maniac  is  very  obstreperous.  Her  husband  left  her 
boarding  here  3  months  ago  and  went  to  Cuba.  When 
she  got  mad  he  was  written  to,  but  has  sent  no  reply, 
and  they  are  keeping  her.  For  the  Aunt's  sake  I  keep 
my  drawer  locked  against  her  at  night.  Old  Sweetser 
is  a  riddle  I  hope  to  do  justice  to  at  some  future  time, 
but  can't  begin  on  now.  His  sister  shakes  like  an 
aspen  whenever  she  is  spoken  to.  Oh  I  forgot  the  most 
important  character  of  all,  the  black  wench  who 
"does"  the  room.  She  is  about  20  years  old  and 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     141 

wears  short  frocks,  but  talks  like  Alice  Robeson  and 
has  an  antediluvian  face  about  as  large  as  the  top  of 
a  flour-barrel. 

I  can  really  keep  my  hand  from  nothing,  of 
whatever  connection,  that  causes  his  intensity 
of  animation  and  spontaneity  of  expression  to 
revive.  On  a  Sunday  evening  early  in  1862  he  had 

just  returned  from  Milton,  and,  after  removing  from 
my  person  a  beetle,  sit  down  to  write  you  immediately. 
Ever  since  10.30  this  A.M.  the  beetle  s'est  promene  a 
1'envi  sur  ma  peau.  The  first  feeling  I  had  of  his  be 
coming  attached  to  it  made  me  jump  so  as  to  scare 
an  old  lady  opposite  me  in  the  car  into  fits.  Finding 
him  too  hard  to  crush  I  let  him  run,  and  at  last  got 
used  to  him  though  at  times  he  tickled  me  to  excrucia 
tion.  I  ache  in  every  limb  and  every  cranny  of  my 
mind  from  my  visit.  .  .  .  They  had  the  usual  number 
of  stories,  wonderful  and  not  wonderful,  to  tell  of 
their  friends  and  relatives  (of  Stephen  somebody,  e.g., 
who  had  a  waggon  weighing  several  tons  run  over  his 
chest  without  even  bruising  him,  and  so  on).  They 
are  very  nice  girls  indeed  all  the  same.  I  then  went, 
near  by,  to  the  Forbes's  in  a  state  of  profuse  perspira 
tion,  and  saw  handsome  Mrs.  F.  and  her  daughters, 
and  a  substitute  for  Governor  Andrew  in  the  person 
of  his  wife;  after  which  I  returned  here,  being  driven 
back  in  the  car,  as  I  perceived  on  the  front  platform, 
by  our  old  familiar  —  familiar  indeed !  —  friend  Wil 
liam  (I  mean  our  Irish  ex-coachman)  whom  age  doesn't 
seem  to  render  more  veracious,  as  he  told  me  several 
very  big  stories  about  himself:  how  he  smashed  a  car 
to  pieces  the  other  night,  how  he  first  gave  the  alarm 
of  the  great  fire,  etc. 


142    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

I  went  to  the  theatre  the  other  night,  and,  asking  a 
gentleman  to  make  room  for  me,  found  him  to  be  Bob 
Temple,  who  had  arrived  in  Boston  that  day.  He 
looks  very  well  and  talks  in  the  most  extraordinary 
way  you  ever  heard  about  Slavery  and  the  wickedness 
of  human  society,  and  is  apparently  very  sincere.  He 
sailed  for  Europe  on  Wednesday.  I  exhorted  him 
to  stop  over  at  Newport,  but  he  wouldn't.  There 
was  something  quite  peculiar  about  him  —  he  seemed 
greatly  changed.  I  can  tell  you  more  at  home,  but 
wish  I  might  have  seen  more  of  him.  I  have  been  the 
last  three  nights  running  to  hear  John  Wilkes  Booth, 
the  "young  American  Roscius."  Rant,  rant,  rant  of 
the  most  fearful  kind.  The  worst  parts  most  ap 
plauded,  but  with  any  amount  of  fire  and  energy  in 
the  passionate  parts,  in  some  of  which  he  really  be 
comes  natural.  .  .  .  You  don't  know  what  a  regular 
Sevigne  you  have  in  Alice.  I  blush  for  my  delin 
quencies  toward  her,  but  bow  my  head  with  meek 
humility,  contented  to  be  her  debtor  all  my  life  and 
despairing  of  ever  repaying  her  the  value  of  her  let 
ters.  Mother  and  Aunt  I  pine  to  see,  and  the  honest 
Jack  Tar  of  the  family,  the  rough  Bob,  with  his  rude 
untutored  ways! 

Traps  for  remembrance  I  find  set  at  every 
turn  here,  so  that  I  have  either  to  dodge  them  or 
patiently  to  suffer  catching.  I  try  in  vain  for 
instance  merely  to  brush  past  the  image  of  our 
kinsman  Robert  Temple  the  younger,  who  made 
with  his  brother  Will  the  eldest  pair  in  that  house 
of  cousins:  he  waylays,  he  persuades  me  too 
much,  and  to  fail  of  the  few  right  words  for  him 
would  be  to  leave  a  deep  debt  unrepaid  —  his 


NOTES  OP  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    143 

fitful  hovering  presence,  repeatedly  vivid  and 
repeatedly  obscured,  so  considerably  "counted" 
for  us,  pointing  the  sharpest  moral,  pointing  fifty 
morals,  and  adorning  a  perpetual  tale.  He  was 
for  years,  first  on  the  nearer  and  then  little  by 
little  on  the  further,  the  furthest,  horizon,  quite 
the  most  emphasised  of  all  our  wastrels,  the  figure 
bristling  most  with  every  irregular  accent  that 
we  were  to  find  ourselves  in  any  closeness  of 
relation  with.  I  held  him  for  myself  at  least, 
from  far  back,  a  pure  gift  of  free-handed  chance 
to  the  grateful  imagination,  the  utmost  limit  of 
whose  complaint  of  it  could  be  but  for  the  diffi 
culty  of  rendering  him  the  really  proper  tribute. 
I  regarded  him  truly,  for  a  long  time,  as  a  pos 
session  of  the  mind,  the  human  image  swung 
before  us  with  most  of  the  effect  of  strong  and 
thick  and  inimitable  colour.  If  to  be  orphaned 
and  free  of  range  had  affected  my  young  fancy 
as  the  happy,  that  is  the  romantic,  lot,  no  member 
of  the  whole  cousinship,  favoured  in  that  sense 
as  so  many  of  them  were,  enjoyed  so,  by  my 
making  out,  the  highest  privilege  of  the  case. 
Nothing,  I  could  afterwards  easily  see,  had  been 
less  inevitable  and  of  a  greater  awkwardness  of 
accident  than  his  being,  soon  after  the  death  of 
his  parents,  shipped  off  from  Albany,  in  pursuit 
of  an  education,  to  an  unheard-of  school  in  a 
remote  corner  of  Scotland;  which  fact  it  was, 


144    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

however,  that  played  for  rne  exactly  the  bright 
part  of  preparing  to  show  with  particular  in 
tensity  what  Europe  again,  with  the  opportunity 
so  given,  was  going  to  proceed  to.  It  thus  shone 
out  when  after  the  lapse  of  several  years  he 
recurred  to  our  more  competent  view  that,  quite 
richly  erratic  creature  as  he  might  appear,  and 
to  whatever  degree  of  wonder  and  suspense,  of 
amusement  and  amazement,  he  might  wind  us 
up,  the  rich  alien  influence,  full  of  special  queer- 
nesses  and  mysteries  in  this  special  connection, 
had  complacently  turned  him  out  for  us  and 
had  ever  so  irretrievably  and  ineffaceably  stamped 
him.  He  rose  before  us,  tall  and  goodlooking 
and  easy,  as  a  figure  of  an  oddly  civilised  per 
versity;  his  irreverent  challenging  humour,  play 
ing  at  once,  without  mercy,  over  American 
aspects,  seemed  somehow  not  less  cultivated 
than  profane  —  just  which  note  in  itself  caused 
the  plot  beautifully  to  thicken;  for  this  was  to 
distinguish  and  almost  embellish  him  throughout 
a  long  career  in  which  he  was  to  neglect  no 
occasion,  however  frankly  forbidding,  for  grace 
less  adventure,  that  he  had  the  pure  derisive, 
the  loose  and  mocking  mind,  yet  initiated, 
educated,  almost  elegantly  impudent,  in  other 
words  successfully  impertinent,  and  which  ex 
pressed  itself,  in  particular  by  the  pen,  with  a 
literary  lightness  that  we  used  to  find  inimitable. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     145 

He  had  dangled  there,  further  off  and  nearer, 
as  a  character,  to  rny  attention,  in  the  sense  in 
which  "people  in  books"  were  characters,  and 
other  people,  roundabout  us,  were  somehow  not; 
so  that  I  fairly  thought  of  him  (though  this 
more,  doubtless,  with  the  lapse  of  time)  very 
much  as  if  we  had  owed  him  to  Thackeray  or 
Dickens,  the  creators  of  superior  life  to  whom 
we  were  at  that  time  always  owing  most,  rather 
than  to  any  set  of  circumstances  by  which  we 
had  in  our  own  persons  felt  served;  that  he  was 
inimitable,  inimitably  droll,  inimitably  wasted, 
wanton,  impossible,  or  whatever  else  it  might 
be,  making  him  thus  one  with  the  rounded  and 
represented  creature,  shining  in  the  light  of  art, 
as  distinguished  from  the  vague  handful  of  more 
or  less  susceptible  material  that  had  in  the 
common  air  to  pass  for  a  true  concretion.  The 
promise  of  this  had  been,  to  my  original  vision, 
in  every  wind-borne  echo  of  him,  however  light; 
I  doubtless  put  people  "into  books"  by  very 
much  the  same  turn  of  the  hand  with  which  I 
took  them  out,  but  it  had  tinged  itself  with  the 
finely  free  that,  proceeding  in  due  course  from 
his  school  at  Fochabers  to  the  University  of 
Aberdeen  (each  sound  and  syllable  of  this  general 
far  cry  from  Albany  had  in  itself  an  incoherence!) 
he  had  encountered  while  there  the  oddest  of 
all  occasions  to  embrace  the  Romish  faith.  In 


146     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

the  same  way  it  ministered  to  the  vivid,  even  if 
baffled,  view  of  him  that  he  appeared  then  to 
have  retreated  upon  the  impenetrable  stronghold 
of  Nairn,  described  by  him  as  a  bleak  little  Scotch 
watering-place  which  yet  sufficed  to  his  cluster 
of  predicaments:  whence  he  began  to  address 
to  his  bewildered  pair  of  Albany  guardians  and 
trustees  the  earlier  of  that  series  of  incomparably 
amusing  letters,  as  we  judged  them,  the  arrival 
of  almost  any  one  of  which  among  us,  out  of  the 
midst  of  indocilities  at  once  more  and  more 
horrific  and  more  and  more  reported  with  a 
desperate  drollery,  was  to  constitute  an  event 
so  supremely  beguiling  that  distressful  meanings 
and  expensive  remedies  found  themselves  alike 
salved  to  consciousness  by  the  fact  that  such 
compositions  could  only  be,  for  people  of  taste, 
enjoyable.  I  think  of  this  hapless  kinsman 
throughout  as  blest  with  a  "form"  that  appealed 
to  the  finer  fibres  of  appreciation;  so  that, 
variously  misadventurous  as  he  was  ever  to 
continue,  his  genius  for  expression  again  and 
again  just  saved  him  —  saved  him  for  bare  life, 
left  in  his  hand  a  broken  piece  of  the  effective 
magic  wand,  never  perhaps  waved  with  anything 
like  that  easy  grace  in  an  equally  compromised 
interest. 

It  was  at  any  rate  as  if  I  had  from  the  first 
collected  and  saved  up  the  echoes  —  or  so  at  least 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    147 

it  seems  to  me  now:  echoes  of  him  as  all  sar 
castically  and  incorrigibly  mutinous,  somewhat 
later  on,  while  in  nominal  charge  of  a  despairing 
pasteur  at  Neuchatel  —  followed  by  the  intensified 
sense  of  him,  after  I  scarce  remember  quite  what 
interval,  on  his  appearing  at  Newport,  where  his 
sisters,  as  I  have  mentioned,  had  been  protectively 
gathered  in,  during  the  year,  more  or  less,  that 
followed  our  own  installation  there.  Then  it 
was  that  we  had  the  value  of  his  being  interesting 
with  less  trouble  taken  to  that  end  —  in  proportion 
to  the  effect  achieved  —  than  perhaps  ever  served 
such  a  cause;  it  would  perhaps  scarce  even  be 
too  much  to  say  that,  as  the  only  trouble  he 
seemed  capable  of  was  the  trouble  of  quite 
positively  declining  to  interest  on  any  terms,  his 
essential  Dickensism,  as  I  have  called  it,  or  his 
Thackeray  an  tint  if  preferred,  his  comedy- virtue 
in  fine,  which  he  could  neither  disown  nor, 
practically  speaking,  misapply,  was  stronger  even 
than  his  particular  sardonic  cynicism,  strongly 
as  that  was  at  last  to  flower.  I  won't  in  the  least 
say  he  dazzled -- that  was  reserved  for  his  so 
quite  otherwise  brilliant,  his  temporarily  trium 
phant,  younger  brother,  at  whom  I  have  already 
glanced,  who  was  on  no  possible  terms  with  him, 
and  never  could  have  been,  so  that  the  difficulty 
of  their  relation  glimmers  upon  me  as  probably 
half  the  good  reason  for  the  original  queer  des- 


148    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

patch  of  the  elder  to  about  the  remotest,  the  most 
separating,  point  in  space  at  which  "educational 
advantages"  could  be  conceived  as  awaiting 
him.  I  must  have  had  no  need  by  that  time  to 
be  dazzled,  or  even  to  be  charmed,  in  order  more 
or  less  fondly,  often  indeed  doubtless  fearfully, 
to  apprehend;  what  I  apprehended  being  that 
here  was  a  creature  quite  amusedly  and  percep 
tively,  quite  attentively  and,  after  a  fashion, 
profitably,  living  without  a  single  one  of  the 
elements  of  life  (of  the  inward,  I  mean,  those 
one  would  most  have  missed  if  deprived  of  them) 
that  I  knew  as  most  conducive  to  animation. 
What  could  have  roused  more  curiosity  than 
this,  for  the  time  at  least,  even  if  there  hadn't 
been  associated  with  it  such  a  fine  redolence,  as 
I  then  supposed  it,  of  the  rich  and  strange  places 
and  things,  as  I  supposed  them,  that  had  contrib 
uted  to  making  him  over?  He  had  come  back 
made  —  unless  one  was  already,  and  too  conve 
niently  or  complacently,  to  call  it  unmade:  that 
was  the  point  (and  it  certainly  wasn't  Albany 
that  ever  would  have  made  him);  he  had  come 
back  charged,  to  my  vision,  with  prodigious 
"English"  impressions  and  awarenesses,  each 
so  thoroughly  and  easily  assimilated  that  they 
might  have  played  their  part  as  convictions  and 
standards  had  he  pretended  to  anything  that 
would  in  that  degree  have  satisfied  us.  He  never 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     149 

spoke  of  his  "faith,"  as  that  might  have  been 
the  thing  we  could  have  held  him  to;  and  he 
knew  what  not  too  gracelessly  to  speak  of  when 
the  sense  of  the  American  grotesque  in  general 
and  the  largely- vie  wed  "family"  reducibility  to 
the  absurd  in  particular  offered  him  such  free 
light  pasture.  He  had  the  sign  of  grace  that  he 
ever  perfectly  considered  my  father  —  so  far  as 
attitude,  distinct  from  behaviour,  went;  but 
most  members  of  our  kinship  on  that  side  still 
clung  to  this  habit  of  consideration  even  when, 
as  was  in  certain  cases  but  too  visible,  they  had 
parted  with  all  sense  of  any  other.  I  have 
preserved  no  happier  truth  about  my  father 
than  that  the  graceless  whom,  according  to  their 
own  fond  term,  he,  and  he  alone  of  all  of  us, 
"understood,"  returned  to  him  as  often  and 
appealed  to  him  as  freely  as  those  happier,  though 
indeed  scarce  less  importunate,  in  their  connection, 
who  found  attraction  and  reason  enough  in  their 
understanding  him.  My  brother's  impression  of 
this  vessel  of  intimations  that  evening  at  the 
Boston  theatre,  and  of  his  "sincerity"  and  his 
seeming  "greatly  changed,"  doesn't  at  all  events, 
I  feel,  fail  in  the  least  to  fit  into  one  of  those 
amplifications  upon  which  my  incurable  trick  of 
unwillingness  wholly  to  sacrifice  any  good  value 
compromised  by  time  tends  to  precipitate  me 
with  a  force  that  my  reader  can  scarce  fear  for 


150     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

me  more  than  I  fear  it  for  myself.  There  was 
no  "extraordinary  way"  in  which  our  incalcu 
lable  kinsman  mightn't  talk,  and  that  William 
should  have  had  for  the  hour  the  benefit  of  this 
general  truth  is  but  a  happy  note  in  my  record. 
It  was  not  always  the  case  that  one  wished  one 
"might  have  seen  more  of  him,"  but  this  was 
only  because  one  had  had  on  any  contact  the 
sense  of  seeing  so  much.  That  produced  conse 
quences  among  which  the  desire  for  more  might 
even  be  uncannily  numbered.  John  Wilkes 
Booth,  of  the  same  evening,  was  of  course  Presi 
dent  Lincoln's  assassin-to-be,  of  whose  crudely 
extravagant  performance  of  the  hero  of  Schiller's 
Robbers  I  recall  my  brother's  imitative  description 
-I  never  myself  saw  him;  and  it  simplifies  his 
case,  I  think,  for  distracted  history,  that  he  must 
have  been  quite  an  abominable  actor.  I  appear 
meanwhile  to  have  paid  William  at  Cambridge  a 
visit  of  which  I  have  quite  oddly  lost  remem 
brance  —  by  reason  doubtless  of  its  but  losing 
itself  in  like,  though  more  prolonged,  occasions 
that  were  to  follow  at  no  great  distance  and  that 
await  my  further  reference.  The  manner  of 
his  own  allusion  to  it  more  than  suffices. 

The  radiance  of  H.'s  visit  has  not  faded  yet,  and  I 
come  upon  gleams  of  it  three  or  four  times  a  day  in  my 
farings  to  and  fro,  but  it  has  never  a  bit  diminished  the 
lustre  of  far-off  shining  Newport,  all  silver  and  blue, 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    151 

and  of  this  heavenly  group  below1  —  all  being  more  or 
less  failures,  especially  the  two  outside  ones.  The  more 
so  as  the  above-mentioned  H.  could  in  no  wise  satisfy 
my  craving  for  knowledge  of  family  and  friends  —  he 
didn't  seem  to  have  been  on  speaking  terms  with  any 
one  for  some  time  past,  and  could  tell  me  nothing  of 
what  they  did,  said  or  thought,  about  any  given  sub 
ject.  Never  did  I  see  a  so-much  uninterested  crea 
ture  in  the  affairs  of  those  about  him.  He  is  a  good 
soul,  though,  in  his  way,  too;  and  less  fatal  than  the 
light  fantastic  and  ever-sociable  Wilky,  who  has 
wrought  little  but  disaster  during  his  stay  with  me; 
breaking  down  my  good  resolutions  about  food,  keep 
ing  me  from  all  intellectual  exercise,  working  havoc 
on  my  best  hat  by  wearing  it  while  dressing,  while  in 
his  nightgown,  while  washing  his  face,  and  all  but 
going  to  bed  with  it.  He  occupied  my  comfortable 
arm-chair  all  the  morning  in  the  position  represented 
in  the  fine  plate  that  accompanies  this  letter  —  but 
one  more  night  though,  and  he  will  have  gone,  and  no 
thorn  shall  pierce  the  side  of  the  serene  and  hallowed 
felicity  of  expectation  in  which  I  shall  revel  till  the 
time  comes  for  returning  home,  home  to  the  hearth 
of  my  infancy  and  budding  youth.  As  Wilky  has 
submitted  to  you  a  resume  of  his  future  history  for 
the  next  few  years,  so  will  I  of  mine,  hoping  it  will 
meet  your  approval.  Thus:  one  year  Chemistry, 
then  one  term  at  home.  Then  one  year  with  Wyman,. 
followed  by  a  medical  education.  Then  five. or  six 
years  with  Agassiz;  after  which  probably  death, 
death,  death  from  inflation  and  plethora  of  knowledge-. 
This  you  had  better  seriously  consider..  So  farewell 
till  8.45  some  Sunday  evening  soon.  Your  bold,  your 
beautiful,  your  blossom! 

1 4  drawing  of  figures  in  evening  lamplight. 


152    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

"I  lead,  as  ever,"  he  meanwhile  elsewhere 
records,  "the  monotonous  life  of  the  scholar, 
with  few  variations." 

We  have  very  general  talk  at  our  table,  Miss  Upham 
declaiming  against  the  vulgarity  of  President  Lincoln 
and  complacently  telling  of  her  own  ignorance  as  to  the 
way  the  wind  blows  or  as  to  the  political  events  going 
on,  and  saying  she  thinks  it  a  great  waste  of  time  and 
of  "no  practical  account"  to  study  natural  history. 
F.  J.  Child  impresses  one  as  very  witty  and  funny,  but 
leaves  it  impossible  to  remember  what  he  says.  I  took 
a  walk  with  the  Divinity  student  this  splendid  after 
noon.  He  told  me  he  had  been  walking  yesterday 
with  one  of  the  Jerseymen  and  they  had  discussed  the 
doctrine  of  a  future  state.  The  Jersey  man  thought 
that  if  the  easy  Unitarian  doctrines  were  to  become 
popular  the  morals  of  the  community  would  be  most 
terribly  relaxed.  "Why,"  said  the  other,  "here  you 
are  in  the  very  thick  of  Unitarianism;  look  about  you 
-people  are  about  as  good  as  anywhere."  "Yes," 
replied  the  Jersey  man,  "I  confess  to  you  that  that  is 
what  has  staggered  me,  and  I  don't  understand  it  yet!" 

I  stretch  over  to  the  next  year,  1863,  for  the 
sake  of  the  following  to  his  sister. 

Cherie  charmante,  I  am  established  in  a  cosy  little 
room,  with  a  large  recess  with  a  window  in  it  contain 
ing  bed  and  washstand,  and  separated  from  the  main 
apartment  by  a  rich  green  silk  curtain  and  a  large  gilt 
cornice.  This  gives  the  whole  establishment  a  splendid 
look.  I  found  when  I  got  back  here  that  Miss  Upham 
had  raised  her  price;  so  great  efforts  were  made  by 
two  of  us  to  form  a  club.  But  too  little  enthusiasm 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    153 

was  shown  by  any  one  else,  and  it  fell  through.  I  then 
with  that  fine  economical  instinct  which  distinguishes 
me  resolved  to  take  breakfast  and  tea,  of  my  own 
finding  and  making,  in  my  room,  and  only  pay  Miss 
Upham  for  dinners.  Miss  U.  is  now  holding  forth  at 
Swampscott,  so  I  asked  to  see  her  sister  Mrs.  Wood 
and  learn  the  cost  of  the  7  dinners  a  week.  She  with 
true  motherly  instinct  said  that  I  should  only  make  a 
slop  with  my  self-made  meals  in  my  room,  and  that 
she  would  rather  let  me  keep  on  for  4.50,  seeing  it 
was  me.  I  said  she  must  first  consult  Miss  Upham. 
She  returned  from  Swampscott  saying  that  Miss  U. 
had  sworn  she  would  rather  pay  me  a  dollar  a  week 
than  have  me  go  away.  Ablaze  with  economic  pas 
sion  I  cried  "Done!"  -  trying  to  make  it  appear  that 
she  had  made  me  a  formal  offer  to  that  effect.  But 
she  then  wouldn't  admit  it,  and  after  much  recrimina 
tion  we  separated,  it  being  agreed  that  I  should  come 
for  4.50,  but  tell  no  one.  So  mind  you  don't  either.  I 
now  lay  my  hand  on  my  heart  and  confidently  look  to 
my  Mother  for  that  glance  of  approbation  which  she 
must  bestow.  Have  I  not  redeemed  any  weaknesses 
of  the  past?  Though  part  of  my  conception  fails,  yet 
it  was  boldly  planned  and  would  have  been  a  noble 
stroke. 

I  have  been  pretty  busy  this  week.  I  have  a  filial 
feeling  toward  Wyman  already.  I  work  in  a  vast 
museum  at  a  table  all  alone,  surrounded  by  skeletons 
of  mastodons,  crocodiles  and  the  like,  with  the  walls 
hung  about  with  monsters  and  horrors  enough  to  freeze 
the  blood.  But  I  have  no  fear,  as  most  of  them  are 
tightly  bottled  up.  Occasionally  solemn  men  and 
women  come  in  to  see  the  museum,  and  sometimes 
timid  little  girls  (reminding  me  of  thee,  my  love,  only 
they  are  less  fashionably  dressed),  who  whisper  "Is 
folks  allowed  here?"  It  pains  me  to  remark,  however, 


154    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

that  not  all  the  little  girls  are  of  this  pleasing  type, 
many  being  bold-faced  jades.  Salter  is  back  here,  but 
morose.  One  or  two  new  students  and  Prof.  Goodwin, 
who  is  very  agreeable.  Also  William  Everett,  son  of 
the  great  Edward,  very  intelligent  and  a  capital 
scholar,  studying  law.  He  took  honours  at  the  En 
glish  Cambridge.  I  send  a  photograph  of  General 
Sickles  for  your  and  Wilky's  amusement.  It  is  a  part 
of  a  great  anthropomorphological  collection  which  I 
am  going  to  make.  So  take  care  of  it,  as  well  as  of  all 
the  photographs  you  will  find  in  the  table-drawer  in 
my  room.  But  isn't  he  a  bully  boy?  Desecrate  the 
room  as  little  as  possible.  If  Wilky  wants  me  as  an 
extra  nurse  send  for  me  without  hesitation. 


VI 

THESE  returns  to  that  first  year  or  two  at 
Newport  contribute  meanwhile  to  filling 
out  as  nothing  in  the  present  pages  has 
yet  done  for  me  that  vision  of  our  father's  unsur 
passable  patience  and  independence,  in  the  inter 
est  of  the  convictions  he  cherished  and  the  expres 
sion  of  them,  as  richly  emphatic  as  it  was  scantly 
heeded,  to  which  he  daily  gave  himself.  We  took 
his  "writing"  infinitely  for  granted  —  we  had 
always  so  taken  it,  and  the  sense  of  him,  each 
long  morning,  at  his  study  table  either  with  bent 
considering  brow  or  with  a  half-spent  and  checked 
intensity,  a  lapse  backward  in  his  chair  and  a 
musing  lift  of  perhaps  troubled  and  baffled  eyes, 
seems  to  me  the  most  constant  fact,  the  most 
closely  interwoven  and  underlying,  among  all 
our  breaks  and  variations.  He  applied  himself 
there  with  a  regularity  and  a  piety  as  little  subject 
to  sighing  abatements  or  betrayed  fears  as  if  he 
had  been  working  under  pressure  for  his  bread 
and  ours  and  the  question  were  too  urgent  for 
his  daring  to  doubt.  This  play  of  his  remarkable 
genius  brought  him  in  fact  throughout  the  long 
years  no  ghost  of  a  reward  in  the  form  of  pence, 
and  could  proceed  to  publicity,  as  it  repeatedly 

155 


156    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

did,  not  only  by  the  copious  and  resigned  sacrifice 
of  such  calculations,  but  by  his  meeting  in  every 
single  case  all  the  expenses  of  the  process.  The 
untired  impulse  to  this  devotion  figured  for  us, 
comprehensively  and  familiarly,  as  "Father's 
Ideas,"  of  the  force  and  truth  of  which  in  his 
own  view  we  were  always  so  respectfully,  even 
though  at  times  so  bewilderedly  and  confoundedly 
persuaded,  that  we  felt  there  was  nothing  in  his 
exhibition  of  life  that  they  didn't  or  couldn't 
account  for.  They  pervaded  and  supported  his 
existence,  and  very  considerably  our  own;  but 
what  comes  back  to  me,  to  the  production  of 
a  tenderness  and  an  admiration  scarce  to  be 
expressed,  is  the  fact  that  though  we  thus  easily 
and  naturally  lived  with  them  and  indeed,  as 
to  their  more  general  effects,  the  colour  and 
savour  they  gave  to  his  talk,  breathed  them  in 
and  enjoyed  both  their  quickening  and  their 
embarrassing  presence,  to  say  nothing  of  their 
almost  never  less  than  amusing,  we  were  left  as 
free  and  unattacked  by.  them  as  if  they  had  been 
so  many  droppings  of  gold  and  silver  coin  on 
tables  and  chimney-pieces,  to  be  "taken"  or 
not  according  to  our  sense  and  delicacy,  that  is 
our  felt  need  and  felt  honour.  The  combination 
in  him  of  his  different  vivacities,  his  living 
interest  in  his  philosophy,  his  living  interest  in  us 
and  his  living  superiority  to  all  greed  of  authority, 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     157 


all  overreaching  or  everemphasising  "success," 
at  least  in  the  heated  short  run,  gave  his  character 
a  magnanimity  by  which  it  was  impossible  to  us 
not  to  profit  in  all  sorts  of  responsive  and  in  fact 
quite  luxurious  ways.  It  was  a  luxury,  I  to-day 
see,  to  have  all  the  benefit  of  his  intellectual  and 
spiritual,  his  religious,  his  philosophic  and  his  / 
social  passion,  without  ever  feeling  the  pressure 
of  it  to  our  direct  irritation  or  discomfort.  It 
would  perhaps  more  truly  figure  the  relation  in 
which  he  left  us  to  these  things  to  have  likened 
our  opportunities  rather  to  so  many  scattered 
glasses  of  the  liquor  of  faith,  poured-out  cups 
stood  about  for  our  either  sipping  or  draining 
down  or  leaving  alone,  in  the  measure  of  our 
thirst,  our  curiosity  or  our  strength  of  head  and 
heart.  /If  there  was  much  leaving  alone  in  us  - 
and  I  freely  confess  that,  so  far  as  the  taking  any 
of  it  all  "straight"  went,  my  lips  rarely  adven 
tured  —  this  was  doubtless  because  we  drank  so 
largely  at  the  source  itself,  the  personally  over 
flowing  and  irrigating.  What  it  then  comes  to, 
for  my  present  vision,  was  that  he  treated  us 
most  of  all  on  the  whole,  as  he  in  fact  treated 
everything,  by  his  saving  imagination  —  which 
set  us,  and  the  more  as  we  were  naturally  so 
inclined,  the  example  of  living  as  much  as  we 
might  in  some  such  light  of  our  own.  If  we  had 
been  asked  in  our  younger  time  for  instance 


158    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

what  were  our  father's  ideas,  or  to  give  an  example 
of  one  of  them,  I  think  we  should  promptly  have 
answered  (I  should  myself  have  hastened  to  do 
so)  that  the  principal  was  a  devoted  attachment 
to  the  writings  of  Swedenborg;  as  to  whom  we 
were  to  remember  betimes,  with  intimate  ap 
preciation,  that  in  reply  to  somebody's  plea  of 
not  finding  him  credible  our  parent  had  pro 
nounced  him,  on  the  contrary,  fairly  "insipid 
with  veracity."  We  liked  that  partly,  I  think, 
because  it  disposed  in  a  manner,  that  is  in  favour 
of  our  detachment,  of  the  great  Emanuel,  but 
when  I  remember  the  part  played,  so  close  beside 
us,  by  this  latter's  copious  revelation,  I  feel 
almost  ashamed  for  my  own  incurious  conduct. 
The  part  played  consisted  to  a  large  extent  in 
the  vast,  even  though  incomplete,  array  of 
Swedenborg's  works,  the  old  faded  covers  of 
which,  anciently  red,  actually  apt  to  be  loose, 
and  backed  with  labels  of  impressive,  though  to 
my  sense  somewhat  sinister  London  imprint, 
Arcana  Coelestia,  Heaven  and  Hell  and  other 
such  matters  —  they  all  had,  as  from  other  days, 
a  sort  of  black  emphasis  of  dignity  —  ranged 
themselves  before  us  wherever,  and  however 
briefly,  we  disposed  ourselves,  forming  even  for 
short  journeys  the  base  of  our  father's  travelling 
library  and  perhaps  at  some  seasons  therewith 
the  accepted  strain  on  our  mother's  patience. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    159 

I  recall  them  as  inveterately  part  of  our  very 
luggage,  requiring  proportionate  receptacles;  I 
recall  them  as,  in  a  number  considerable  even 
when  reduced,  part  of  their  proprietor's  own 
most  particular  dependence  on  his  leaving  home, 
during  our  more  agitated  years,  for  those  specu 
lative  visits  to  possible  better  places  (than 
whatever  place  of  the  moment)  from  which,  as  I 
have  elsewhere  mentioned,  he  was  apt  to  return 
under  premature,  under  passionate  nostalgic, 
reaction.  The  Swedenborgs  were  promptly  out 
again  on  their  customary  shelves  or  sometimes 
more  improvised  perches,  and  it  was  somehow 
not  till  we  had  assured  ourselves  of  this  that  we 
felt  that  incident  closed. 

Nothing  could  have  exceeded  at  the  same 
time  our  general  sense  —  unless  I  all  discreetly 
again  confine  myself  to  the  spare  record  of  my 
own  --  for  our  good  fortune  in  never  having  been, 
even  when  most  helpless,  dragged  by  any  approach 
to  a  faint  jerk  over  the  threshold  of  the  inhabited 
temple.  It  stood  there  in  the  centre  of  our 
family  life,  into  which  its  doors  of  fine  austere 
bronze  opened  straight;  we  passed  and  repassed 
them  when  we  didn't  more  consciously  go  round 
and  behind;  we  took  for  granted  vague  grand 
things  within,  but  we  never  paused  to  peer  or 
penetrate,  and  none  the  less  never  had  the  so 
natural  and  wistful,  perhaps  even  the  so  properly 


160    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

resentful,  "Oh  I  say,  do  look  in  a  moment  for 
manners  if  for  nothing  else!"  called  after  us  as 
we  went.  LOur  admirable  mother  sat  on  the  steps 
at  least  and  caught  reverberations  of  the  inward 
mystic  choir;  but  there  were  positive  contem 
porary  moments  when  I  well-nigh  became  aware, 
I  think,  of  something  graceless,  something  not 
to  the  credit  of  my  aspiring  "intellectual  life," 
or  of  whatever  small  pretensions  to  seriousness 
I  might  have  begun  to  nourish,  in  the  anything 
but  heroic  impunity  of  my  inattention.  William, 
later  on,  made  up  for  this  not  a  little,  redeeming 
so,  to  a  large  extent,  as  he  grew  older,  our  filial 
honour  in  the  matter  of  a  decent  sympathy,  if 
not  of  a  noble  curiosity:  distinct  to  me  even  are 
certain  echoes  of  passages  between  our  father 
and  his  eldest  son  that  I  assisted  at,  more  or  less 
indirectly  and  wonderingly,  as  at  intellectual 
"scenes,"  gathering  from  them  portents  of  my 
brother's  independent  range  of  speculation,  agita 
tions  of  thought  and  announcements  of  difference, 
which  could  but  have  represented,  far  beyond 
anything  I  should  ever  have  to  show,  a  gained 
and  to  a  considerable  degree  an  enjoyed,  con 
fessedly  an  interested,  acquaintance  with  the 
paternal  philosophic  penetralia.  That  particular 
impression  refers  indeed  to  hours  which  at  the 
point  I  have  reached  had  not  yet  struck;  but  I 
am  touched  even  now,  after  all  the  years,  with 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    161 

something  exquisite  in  my  half-grasped  pre 
monitory  vision  of  their  belonging,  these  belated 
discussions  that  were  but  the  flowering  of  the 
first  germs  of  such  other,  doubtless  already  such 
opposed,  perceptions  and  conclusions,  to  that 
order  of  thin  consolations  and  broken  rewards 
which  long  figured  as  the  most  and  the  best  of 
what  was  to  have  been  waited  for  on  our  com 
panion's  part  without  the  escape  of  a  plaint. 
Yet  I  feel  I  may  claim  that  our  awareness  of  all 
that  was  so  serenely  dispensed  with  -  -  to  call  it 
missed  would  have  been  quite  to  falsify  the  story 
and  reflect  meanly  on  the  spirit  —  never  in  the 
least  brutally  lapsed  from  admiration,  however 
unuttered  the  sentiment  itself,  after  the  fashion 
of  raw  youth;  it  is  in  fact  quite  distinct  to  me 
that,  had  there  been  danger  of  this,  there  came 
to  us  from  our  mother's  lips  at  intervals  long 
enough  to  emphasise  the  final  sincerity  and 
beauty  a  fairly  sacred  reminder  of  that  strain  of 
almost  solely  self-nourished  equanimity,  or  in 
other  words  insuperable  gaiety,  in  her  life's 
comrade,  which  she  had  never  seen  give  way. 
This  was  the  very  gaiety  that  kept  through  the 
years  coming  out  for  us  —  to  the  point  of  inviting 
free  jokes  and  other  light  familiarities  from  us 
at  its  expense.  The  happiest  household  pleas 
antry  invested  our  legend  of  our  mother's  fond 
habit  of  address,  "Your  father's  ideas,  you 


162    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

know — !"  which  was  always  the  signal  for  our 
embracing  her  with  the  last  responsive  finality 
(and,  for  the  full  pleasure  of  it,  in  his  presence). 
Nothing  indeed  so  much  as  his  presence  en 
couraged  the  licence,  as  I  may  truly  call  it,  of 
the  legend  —  that  is  of  our  treatment  en  famille 
of  any  reference  to  the  attested  public  weight 
of  his  labours;  which,  I  hasten  to  add,  was  much 
too  esoteric  a  ground  of  geniality,  a  dear  old 
family  joke,  not  to  be  kept,  for  its  value,  to  our 
selves.  But  there  comes  back  to  me  the  im 
pression  of  his  appearing  on  occasion  quite 
moved  to  the  exuberance  of  cheer  —  as  a  form  of 
refreshment  he  could  draw  on  for  a  stronger  and 
brighter  spurt,  I  mean  —  by  such  an  apology  for 
resonance  of  reputation  as  our  harmless,  our  of 
course  utterly  edgeless,  profanity  represented.  It 
might  have  been  for  him,  by  a  happy  stretch,  a 
sign  that  the  world  did  know  —  taking  us  for  the 
moment,  in  our  selfish  young  babble,  as  a  part  of 
the  noise  of  the  world.  Nothing,  at  the  same 
time,  could  alter  the  truth  of  his  case,  or  can  at 
least  alter  it  to  me  now:  he  had,  intellectually, 
convictionally,  passionally  speaking,  a  selfless 
detachment,  a  lack  of  what  is  called  the  eye  for 
effect  —  always  I  mean  of  the  elated  and  interested 
order  —  which  I  can  but  marvel  at  in  the  light  of 
the  rare  aptitude  of  his  means  to  his  end,  and  in 
that  of  the  beauty  of  both,  though  the  stamp  was 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    163 

doubtless  most  vivid,  for  so  differing,  so  gropingly 
"esthetic"  a  mind  as  my  own,  in  his  unfailingly 
personal  and  admirable  style.  We  knew  he  had 
thoroughly  his  own  "unconventional"  form, 
which,  by  the  unspeakable  law  of  youth,  we 
managed  to  feel  the  distinction  of  as  not  plati 
tudinous  even  while  we  a  bit  sneakingly  felt  it 
as  quotable,  on  possible  occasions,  against  our 
presence  of  mind;  the  great  thing  was  at  all 
events  that  we  couldn't  live  with  him  without 
the  sense  that  if  his  books  resembled  his  talk  and 
his  character  —  as  we  moreover  felt  they  couldn't 
help  almost  violently  doing  —  they  might  want 
for  this,  that  or  the  other  which  kept  the  con 
ventional  true  to  its  type,  but  could  as  little 
fail  to  flush  with  the  strong  colour,  colour  so 
remarkably  given  and  not  taken,  projected  and 
not  reflected,  colour  of  thought  and  faith  and 
moral  and  expressional  atmosphere,  as  they 
could  leave  us  without  that  felt  side-wind  of  their 
strong  composition  which  made  after  all  so  much 
of  the  air  we  breathed  and  was  in  the  last  resort 
the  gage  of  something  perpetually  fine  going  on. 

It  is  not  too  much  to  say,  I  think,  that  our 
religious  education,  so  far  as  we  had  any,  con 
sisted  wholly  in  that  loose  yet  enlightening 
impression:  I  say  so  far  as  we  had  any  in  spite 
of  my  very  definitely  holding  that  it  would 
absolutely  not  have  been  possible  to  us,,  in  the 


164     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

measure  of  our  sensibility,  to  breathe  more  the 
air  of  that  reference  to  an  order  of  goodness  and 
power  greater  than  any  this  world  by  itself  can 
show  which  we  understand  as  the  religious  spirit. 
Wondrous  to  me,  as  I  consider  again,  that  my 
father's  possession  of  this  spirit,  in  a  degree  that 
made  it  more  deeply  one  with  his  life  than  I 
can  conceive  another  or  a  different  case  of  its 
being,  should  have  been  unaccompanied  with  a 
single  one  of  the  outward  or  formal,  the  theo 
logical,  devotional,  ritual,  or  even  implicitly 
pietistic  signs  by  which  we  usually  know  it.  The 
fact  of  course  was  that  his  religion  was  nothing 
if  not  a  philosophy,  extraordinarily  complex  and 
worked  out  and  original,  intensely  personal  as  an 
exposition,  yet  not  only  susceptible  of  applica 
tion,  but  clamorous  for  it,  to  the  whole  field  of 
consciousness,  nature  and  society,  history,  knowl 
edge,  all  human  relations  and  questions,  every 
pulse  of  the  process  of  our  destiny.  Of  this  vast 
and  interesting  conception,  as  striking  an  expres 
sion  of  the  religious  spirit  surely  as  ever  was  put 
forth,  his  eldest  son  has  given  an  account L  —  so 
far  as  this  was  possible  at  once  with  brevity  and 
with  full  comprehension -- that  I  should  have 
been  unable  even  to  dream  of  aspiring  to,  and  in 
the  masterly  clearness  and  justice  of  which  the 

1  Literary  Remains  of  Henry  James,  Boston,   1885.     The  portrait  ac 
companying  the  volume  gave  us,  alas,  but  the  scantest  satisfaction. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    165 

opportunity  of  the  son  blends  with  that  of  the 
critic,  each  character  acting  in  perfect  felicity, 
after  a  fashion  of  which  I  know  elsewhere  no  such 
fine  example.  It  conveys  the  whole  sense  of 
our  father's  philosophic  passion,  which  was  theo- 
logic,  by  my  direct  impression  of  it,  to  a  degree 
fairly  outdistancing  all  theologies;  representing 
its  weight,  reproducing  its  utterance,  placing  it 
in  the  eye  of  the  world,  and  making  for  it  the 
strong  and  single  claim  it  suggests,  in  a  manner 
that  leaves  nothing  to  be  added  to  the  subject. 
(l  am  not  concerned  with  the  intrinsic  meaning 
of  these  things  here,  and  should  not  be  even 
had  they  touched  me  more  directly,  or  more 
converted  me  from  what  I  can  best  call,  to  my 
doubtless  scant  honour,  a  total  otherness  of 
contemplation,  during  the  years  when  my  privi 
lege  was  greatest  and  my  situation  for  inquiry 
and  response  amplest;  but  the  active,  not  to 
say  the  obvious,  moral  of  them,  in  all  our  younger 
time,  was  that  a  life  of  the  most  richly  consequent 
flowed  straight  out  of  them,  that  in  this  life,  the 
most  abundantly,  and  above  all  naturally,  com 
municated  as  life  that  it  was  possible  to  imagine, 
we  had  an  absolutely  equal  share,  and  that  in 
fine  I  was  to  live  to  go  back  with  wonder  and 
admiration  to  the  quantity  of  secreted  thought 
in  our  daily  medium,  the  quality  of  intellectual 
passion,  the  force  of  cogitation  and  aspiration, 


166     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

as  to  the  explanation  both  of  a  thousand  surface 
incoherences  and  a  thousand  felt  felicities.  A 
religion  that  was  so  systematically  a  philosophy, 
a  philosophy  that  was  so  sweepingly  a  religion, 
being  together,  by  their  necessity,  as  I  have  said, 
an  intensity  of  relation  to  the  actual,  the  con 
sciousness  so  determined  was  furnished  forth  in 
a  way  that  met  by  itself  the  whole  question  of 
the  attitude  of  "worship"  for  instance;  as  I 
have  attempted  a  little  to  show  that  it  met,  with 
a  beautiful  good  faith  and  the  easiest  sufficiency, 
every  other  when  such  came  up:  those  of  educa 
tion,  acquisition,  material  vindication,  what  is 
called  success  generally.  In  the  beauty  of  the 
whole  thing,  again,  I  lose  myself  -  -  by  which  I 
mean  in  the  fact  that  we  were  all  the  while 
partaking,  to  our  most  intimate  benefit,  of  an 
influence  of  direction  and  enlargement  attended 
with  scarce  a  single  consecrated  form  and  which 
would  have  made  many  of  these,  had  we  been 
exposed  to  intrusion  from  them,  absurdly  irrele 
vant.  My  father  liked  in  our  quite  younger 
period  to  read  us  chapters  from  the  New  Testa 
ment  and  the  Old,  and  I  hope  we  liked  to  listen 
to  them  —  though  I  recall  their  seeming  dreary 
from  their  association  with  school  practice;  but 
that  was  the  sole  approach  to  a  challenge  of 
our  complete  freedom  of  inward,  not  less  than 
our.  natural  ingenuity  of  outward,  experience^ 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     167 

No  other  explicit  address  to  us  in  the  name  of  the 
Divine  could,  I  see,  have  been  made  with  any 
congruity  —  in  face  of  the  fact  that  invitations 
issued  in  all  the  vividest  social  terms,  terms  of 
living  appreciation,  of  spiritual  perception,  of 
"human  fellowship,"  to  use  the  expression  that 
was  perhaps  oftenest  on  his  lips  and  his  pen  alike, 
were  the  very  substance  of  the  food  supplied  in 
the  parental  nest. 

The  freedom  from  pressure  that  we  enjoyed  in 
every  direction,  all  those  immunities  and  exemp 
tions  that  had  been,  in  protracted  childhood, 
positively  embarrassing  to  us,  as  I  have  already 
noted,  before  the  framework,  ecclesiastical  and 
mercantile,  squared  at  us  as  with  reprobation 
from  other  households,  where  it  seemed  so  to 
conduce  to  their  range  of  resource  —  these  things 
consorted  with  our  yet  being  yearned  over  or 
prescribed  for,  by  every  implication,  after  a 
fashion  that  was  to  make  the  social  organisation 
of  such  invidious  homes,  under  my  subsequent 
observation  of  life,  affect  me  as  so  much  bleak 
penury  or  domestic  desert  where  these  things  of 
the  spirit,  these  genialities  of  faith  were  con 
cerned.  Well  do  I  remember,  none  the  less,  how 
I  was  troubled  all  along  just  by  this  particular 
crookedness  of  our  being  so  extremely  religious 
without  having,  as  it  were,  anything  in  the  least 
classified  or  striking  to  show  for  it;  so  that  the 


168    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

measure  of  other-worldliness  pervading  our  prem 
ises  was  rather  a  waste,  though  at  the  same 
time  oddly  enough  a  congestion  —  projecting  out 
wardly  as  it  did  no  single  one  of  those  usual 
symptoms  of  propriety  any  of  which,  gathered  at 
a  venture  from  the  general  prospect,  might  by 
my  sense  have  served:  I  shouldn't  have  been 
particular,  I  thought,  as  to  the  selection.  Re 
ligion  was  a  matter,  by  this  imagination,  to  be 
worked  off  much  more  than  to  be  worked  in,  and 
I  fear  my  real  vague  sentiment  to  have  been  but 
that  life  would  under  the  common  equipment  be 
somehow  more  amusing;  and  this  even  though, 
as  I  don't  forget,  there  was  not  an  item  of  the 
detail  of  devotional  practice  that  we  had  been 
so  much  as  allowed  to  divine.  I  scarce  know  why 
I  should  have  wanted  anything  more  amusing, 
as  most  of  our  coevals  would  have  regarded  it, 
than  that  we  had  from  as  far  back  as  I  could 
remember  indulged  in  no  shade  of  an  approach 
to  "keeping  Sunday";  which  is  one  of  the 
reasons  why  to  speak  as  if  piety  could  have 
borne  for  us  any  sense  but  the  tender  human,  or 
to  speak  at  all  of  devotion,  unction,  initiation, 
even  of  the  vaguest,  into  the  exercises  or  profes 
sions,  as  among  our  attributes,  would  falsify 
altogether  our  mere  fortune  of  a  general  liberty 
of  living,  of  making  ourselves  as  brightly  at  home 
as  might  be,  in  that  "spiritual  world"  which  we 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    169 

were  in  the  habit  of  hearing  as  freely  alluded  to 
as  we  heard  the  prospect  of  dinner  or  the  call  of 
the  postman.  The  oddity  of  my  own  case,  as  I 
make  it  out  so  far  as  it  involved  a  confused 
criticism,  was  that  my  small  uneasy  mind, 
bulging  and  tightening  in  the  wrong,  or  at  least 
in  unnatural  and  unexpected,  places,  like  a  little 
jacket  ill  cut  or  ill  sewn,  attached  its  gaping  view, 
as  I  have  already  more  than  enough  noted,  to 
things  and  persons,  objects  and  aspects,  frivolities 
all,  I  dare  say  I  was  willing  to  grant,  compared 
with  whatever  manifestations  of  the  serious, 
these  being  by  need,  apparently,  the  abstract; 
and  that  in  fine  I  should  have  been  thankful  for 
a  state  of  faith,  a  conviction  of  the  Divine,  an 
interpretation  of  the  universe  —  anything  one 
might  have  made  bold  to  call  it  —  which  would 
have  supplied  more  features  or  appearances.  Feel 
ing  myself  "after"  persons  so  much  more  than 
after  anything  else  -  -  to  recur  to  that  side  of  my 
earliest  and  most  constant  consciousness  which 
might  have  been  judged  most  deplorable  —  I 
take  it  that  I  found  the  sphere  of  our  more 
nobly  supposititious  habitation  too  imperceptibly 
peopled;  whereas  the  religious  life  of  every  other 
family  that  could  boast  of  any  such  '(and  what 
family  didn't  boast?)  affected  my  fancy  as  with 
a  social  and  material  crowdedness.  That  faculty 
alone  was  affected  -  -  this  I  hasten  to  add ;  no 


170    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

directness  of  experience  ever  stirred  for  me;  it 
being  the  case  in  the  first  place  that  I  scarce 
remember,  as  to  all  our  young  time,  the  crossing 
of  our  threshold  by  any  faint  shade  of  an  ecclesi 
astical  presence,  or  the  lightest  encounter  with 
any  such  elsewhere,  and  equally  of  the  essence, 
over  and  above,  that  the  clerical  race,  the  pre 
eminently  restrictive  tribe,  as  I  apprehended 
them,  couldn't  very  well  have  agreed  less  with 
the  general  colour  of  my  fondest  vision:  if  it  be 
not  indeed  more  correct  to  say  that  I  was  reduced 
to  supposing  they  couldn't.  We  knew  in  truth 
nothing  whatever  about  them,  a  fact  that,  as  I 
recover  it,  also  flushes  for  me  with  its  fine  awk 
wardness  —  the  social  scene  in  general  handsomely 
bristling  with  them  to  the  rueful  view  I  sketch, 
and  they  yet  remaining  for  us,  or  at  any  rate  for 
myself,  such  creatures  of  pure  hearsay  that  when 
late  in  my  teens,  and  in  particular  after  my 
twentieth  year,  I  began  to  see  them  portrayed  by 
George  Eliot  and  Anthony  Trollope  the  effect  was 
a  disclosure  of  a  new  and  romantic  species. 
Strange  beyond  my  present  power  to  account 
for  it  this  anomaly  that  amid  a  civilisation  replete 
with  "ministers"  —  for  we  at  least  knew  the 
word  —  actively,  competitively,  indeed  as  would 
often  appear  quite  violently,  ministering,  so  little 
sense  of  a  brush  against  approved  examples  was 
ever  to  attend  me  that  I  had  finally  to  draw  my 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    171 

nearest  sufficiency  of  a  true  image  from  pictures 
of  a  social  order  largely  alien  to  our  own.  All  of 
which,  at  the  same  time,  I  allow  myself  to  add, 
didn't  mitigate  the  simple  fact  of  my  felt  —  my 
indeed  so  luxuriously  permitted  —  detachment  of 
sensibility  from  everything,  everything,  that  is, 
in  the  way  of  great  relations,  as  to  which  our 
father's  emphasis  was  richest.  There  was  the 
dim  dissociation,  there  my  comparative  poverty, 
or  call  it  even  frivolity,  of  instinct:  I  gaped 
imaginatively,  as  it  were,  to  such  a  different  set  of 
relations.  I  couldn't  have  framed  stories  that 
would  have  succeeded  in  involving  the  least  of 
the  relations  that  seemed  most  present  to  him; 
while  those  most  present  to  myself,  that  is  more 
complementary  to  whatever  it  was  I  thought  of 
as  humanly  most  interesting,  attaching,  inviting, 
were  the  ones  his  schemes  of  importances  seemed 
virtually  to  do  without.  Didn't  I  discern  in 
this  from  the  first  a  kind  of  implied  snub  to  the 
significance  of  mine?  —  so  that,  in  the  blest 
absence  of  "pressure"  which  I  just  sought  here 
passingly  to  celebrate,  I  could  brood  to  my  heart's 
content  on  the  so  conceivable  alternative  of  a 
field  of  exposure  crammed  with  those  objective 
appearances  that  my  faculty  seemed  alobfc  fitted 
to  grasp.  In  which  there  was  ever  the  small 
torment  of  the  fact  —  though  I  don't  quite  see 
to-day  why  it  should  not  have  been  of  a  purely 


172    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

pleasant  irritation -- that  what  our  parent  most 
overflowed  with  was  just  the  brave  contradiction 
or  opposition  between  all  his  parts,  a  thing  which 
made  for  perfect  variety,  which  he  carried  ever 
so  easily  and  brightly,  and  which  would  have  put 
one  no  less  in  the  wrong  had  one  accused  him  of 
knowing  only  the  abstract  (as  I  was  so  com 
placently  and  invidiously  disposed  to  name  it) 
than  if  one  had  foolishly  remarked  on  his  living 
and  concluding  without  it.  But  I  have  already 
made  clear  his  great  mixed  range  —  which  of 
course  couldn't  not  have  been  the  sign  of  a  mind 
conceiving  our  very  own  breathing  humanity 
in  its  every  fibre  the  absolute  expression  of  a 
resident  Divinity]  No  element  of  character,  no 
spontaneity  of  life,  but  instantly  seized  his 
attention  and  incurred  his  greeting  and  his 
comment;  which  things  could  never  possibly 
have  been  so  genially  alert  and  expert  —  as  I  have, 
again,  before  this,  superabundantly  recorded  —  if 
it  had  not  fairly  fed  on  active  observation  and 
contact.  He  could  answer  one  with  the  radiant 
when  one  challenged  him  with  the  obscure,  just 
as  he  could  respond  with  the  general  when  one 
pulled  at  the  particular;  and  I  needn't  repeat 
that  this  made  for  us,  during  all  our  time,  any 
thing  but  a  starved  actuality. 

None    the    less,    however,    I    remember    it    as 
'    savouring  of  loss  to  me  —  which  is  my  present 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    173 

point  —  that  our  so  thoroughly  informal  scene 
of  susceptibility  seemed  to  result  from  a  positive 
excess  of  familiarity,  in  his  earlier  past,  with  such 
types  of  the  shepherd  and  the  flock,  to  say 
nothing  of  such  forms  of  the  pasture,  as  might 
have  met  in  some  degree  my  appetite  for  the 
illustrational.  This  was  one  of  the  things  that 
made  me  often  wish,  as  I  remember,  that  I  might 
have  caught  him  sooner  or  younger,  less  developed, 
as  who  should  say;  the  matters  that  appeared, 
however  confusedly,  to  have  started  his  develop 
ment  being  by  this  measure  stranger  and  livelier 
than  most  of  those  that  finally  crowned  it, 
marked  with  their  own  colour  as  many  of  these 
doubtless  were.  Three  or  four  strongest  pages  in 
the  fragment  of  autobiography  gathered  by  his 
eldest  son  into  the  sheaf  of  his  Literary  Remains 
describe  the  state  of  soul  undergone  by  him  in 
England,  in  '44,  just  previous  to  the  hour  at 
which  Mrs.  Chichester,  a  gentle  lady  of  his 
acquaintance  there,  brought  to  his  knowledge,  by 
a  wondrous  chance,  the  possibility  that  the  great 
Swedenborg,  from  whom  she  had  drawn  much 
light,  might  have  something  to  say  to  his  case; 
so  that  under  the  impression  of  his  talk  with  her 
he  posted  at  once  up  to  London  from  the  neigh 
bourhood  of  Windsor,  where  he  was  staying, 
possessed  himself  of  certain  volumes  of  the 
writings  of  the  eminent  mystic  (so-called  I  mean, 


174    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

for  to  my  father  this  description  of  him  was 
grotesque),  and  passed  rapidly  into  that  grateful 
infinitude  of  recognition  and  application  which  he 
was  to  inhabit  for  the  rest  of  his  days.  I  saw  him 
move  about  there  after  the  fashion  of  the  oldest 
and  easiest  native,  and  this  had  on  some  sides 
its  own  considerable  effect,  tinged  even  on  occasion 
with  romance;  yet  I  felt  how  the  real  right  thing 
for  me  would  have  been  the  hurrying  drama  of 
the  original  rush,  the  interview  with  the  admira 
ble  Mrs.  Chichester,  the  sweet  legend  of  his  and 
my  mother's  charmed  impression  of  whom  had 
lingered  with  us  —  I  admired  her  very  name,  there 
seeming  none  other  among  us  at  all  like  it;  and 
then  the  return  with  the  tokens  of  light,  the 
splendid  agitation  as  the  light  deepened,  and  the 
laying  in  of  that  majestic  array  of  volumes  which 
were  to  form  afterward  the  purplest  rim  of  his 
library's  horizon  and  which  I  was  thus  capable, 
for  my  poor  part,  of  finding  valuable,  in  default 
of  other  values,  as  coloured  properties  in  a  fine 
fifth  act.  It  was  all  a  play  I  hadn't  "been  to," 
consciously  at  least  —  that  was  the  trouble;  the 
curtain  had  fallen  while  I  was  still  tucked  in  my 
crib,  and  I  assisted  but  on  a  comparatively  flat 
home  scene  at  the  echo  of  a  great  success.  I 
could  still  have  done,  for  the  worst,  with  a 
consciousness  of  Swedenborg  that  should  have 
been  graced  at  least  with  Swedenborgians  - 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    175 

aware  as  I  was  of  the  existence  of  such  enrolled 
disciples,  ornaments  of  a  church  of  their  own,  yet 
known  to  us  only  as  persons  rather  acidly  mysti 
fied  by  the  inconvenience,  as  we  even  fancied 
them  to  feel  it,  of  our  father's  frankly  independent 
and  disturbingly  irregular  (all  the  more  for  its 
being  so  expressive)  connection  with  their  inspirer. 
In  the  light  or  the  dusk  of  all  this  it  was  surely 
impossible  to  make  out  that  he  professed  any 
faint  shade  of  that  clerical  character  as  to  his 
having  incurred  which  we  were,  "in  the  world," 
to  our  bewilderment,  not  infrequently  questioned. 
Those  of  the  enrolled  order,  in  the  matter  of  his 
and  their  subject  of  study,  might  in  their  way 
too  have  raised  to  my  regard  a  fretted  vault  or 
opened  a  long-drawn  aisle,  but  they  were  never 
at  all,  in  the  language  of  a  later  day,  to  materialise 
to  me;  we  neither  on  a  single  occasion  sat  in 
their  circle,  nor  did  one  of  them,  to  the  best  of 
my  belief,  ever  stray,  remonstrantly  or  invitingly, 
into  ours;  where  Swedenborg  was  read  not  in 
the  least  as  the  Bible  scarce  more  than  just 
escaped  being,  but  even  as  Shakespeare  or  Dickens 
or  Macaulay  was  content  to  be  —  which  was 
without  our  arranging  or  subscribing  for  it.  I 
seem  to  distinguish  that  if  a  fugitive  or  a  shy 
straggler  from  the  pitched  camp  did  turn  up  it 
was  under  cover  of  night  or  of  curiosity  and 
with  much  panting  and  putting  off  of  the  mantle, 


176    NOTES  OP  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

much  nervous  laughter  above  all  —  this  safe, 
however,  to  become  on  the  shortest  order  amuse 
ment  easy  and  intimate.  That  figured  something 
in  a  slight  way  —  as  at  least  I  suppose  I  may 
infer  from  the  faint  adunjb ration  I  retain;  but 
nothing  none  the  less  much  attenuated  what  I 
suppose  I  should  have  denounced  as  the  falsity 
of  our  position  (meaning  thereby  of  mine)  had 
I  been  constitutionally  at  all  voluble  for  such 
flights.  Constructionally  we  had  all  the  fun  of 
licence,  while  the  truth  seemed  really  to  be  that 
fun  in  the  religious  connection  closely  depended 
on  bondage.  The  fun  was  of  course  that  I  wanted 
in  this  line  of  diversion  something  of  the  coarser 
strain;  which  came  home  to  me  in  especial,  to 
cut  the  matter  short,  when  I  was  present,  as  I 
yielded  first  and  last  to  many  an  occasion  for 
being,  at  my  father's  reading  out  to  my  mother 
with  an  appreciation  of  that  modest  grasp  of 
somebody's  attention,  the  brief  illusion  of  pub 
licity,  which  has  now  for  me  the  exquisite  grace 
of  the  touching,  some  series  of  pages  from  among 
his  "papers"  that  were  to  show  her  how  he  had 
this  time  at  last  done  it.  '  No  touch  of  the  beauti 
ful  or  the  sacred  in  the  disinterested  life  can  have 
been  absent  from  such  scenes  -- 1  find  every  such 
ideally  there;  and  my  memory  rejoices  above  all 
in  their  presentation  of  our  mother  at  her  very 
perfectest  of  soundless  and  yet  absolutely  all- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    177 

saving  service  and  trust.  To  have  attempted 
any  projection  of  our  father's  aspect  without  an 
immediate  reference  to  her  sovereign  care  for 
him  and  for  all  of  us  as  the  so  widely  open,  yet 
so  softly  enclosing,  lap  of  all  his  liberties  and 
all  our  securities,  all  our  variety  and  withal  our 
harmony,  the  harmony  that  was  for  nine-tenths 
of  it  our  sense  of  her  gathered  life  in  us,  and  of 
her  having  no  other  —  to  have  so  proceeded  has 
been  but  to  defer  by  instinct  and  by  scruple  to 
the  kind  of  truth  and  of  beauty  before  which  the 
direct  report  breaks  down.  I  may  well  have 
stopped  short  with  what  there  would  be  to  say, 
and  yet  what  account  of  us  all  can  pretend  to 
have  gone  the  least  bit  deep  without  coming  to 
our  mother  at  every  penetration?  -We  simply 
lived  by  her,  in  proportion  as  we  lived  spontane 
ously,  with  an  equanimity  of  confidence,  an 
independence  of  something  that  I  should  now 
find  myself  think  of  as  decent  compunction  if 
I  didn't  try  to  call  it  instead  morbid  delicacy, 
which  left  us  free  for  detachments  of  thought  and 
flights  of  mind,  experiments,  so  to  speak,  on  the 
assumption  of  our  genius  and  our  intrinsic  interest, 
that  I  look  back  upon  as  to  a  luxury  of  the  un- 
worried  that  is  scarce  of  this  world.  This  was 
a  support  on  which  my  father  rested  with  the 
absolute  whole  of  his  weight,  and  it  was  when 
I  felt  her  listen  with  the  whole  of  her  usefulness, 


178    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

which  needed  no  other  force,  being  as  it  was  the 
whole  of  her  tenderness  and  amply  sufficing  by 
itself,  that  I  understood  most  what  it  was  so  to 
rest  and  so  to  act.  When  in  the  fulness  of  the 
years  she  was  to  die,  and  he  then  to  give  us  time, 
a  few  months,  as  with  a  beatific  depth  of  design, 
to  marvel  at  the  manner  of  his  acceptance  of  the 
stroke,  a  shown  triumph  of  his  philosophy,  he 
simply  one  day  consciously  ceased,  quietly  de 
clined  to  continue,  as  an  offered  measure  of  his 
loss  of  interest.  Nothing  —  he  had  enabled  him 
self  to  make  perfectly  sure  —  was  in  the  least 
worth  while  without  her;  this  attested,  he 
passed  away  or  went  out,  with  entire  simplicity, 
promptness  and  ease,  for  the  definite  reason  that 
his  support  had  failed.  His  philosophy  had  been 
not  his  support  but  his  suspension,  and  he  had 
never,  I  am  sure,  felt  so  lifted  as  at  that  hour, 
which  splendidly  crowned  his  faith.  It  showed 
us  more  intimately  still  what,  in  this  world  of 
cleft  components,  one  human  being  can  yet  be 
for  another,  and  how  a  form  of  vital  aid  may 
have  operated  for  years  with  such  perfection  as 
fairly  to  have  made  recognition  seem  at  the  time 
a  sort  of  excess  of  reaction,  an  interference  or  a 
pedantry.  All  which  is  imaged  for  me  while  I 
see  our  mother  listen,  at  her  work,  to  the  full 
music  of  the  "papers."  She  could  do  that  by 
the  mere  force  of  her  complete  availability,  and 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     179 

could  do  it  with  a  smoothness  of  surrender  that 
was  like  an  array  of  all  the  perceptions.  The 
only  thing  that  I  might  well  have  questioned  on 
these  occasions  was  the  possibility  on  the  part 
of  a  selflessness  so  consistently  and  unabatedly 
active  of  its  having  anything  ever  left  acutely  to 
offer;  to  abide  so  unbrokenly  in  such  inaptness 
for  the  personal  claim  might  have  seemed  to 
render  difficult  such  a  special  show  of  it  as  any 
particular  pointedness  of  hospitality  would  pro 
pose  to  represent.  I  dare  say  it  was  our  sense  of 
this  that  so  often  made  us  all,  when  the  explicit 
or  the  categoric,  the  impulse  of  acclamation, 
flowered  out  in  her,  find  our  happiest  play  of 
filial  humour  in  just  embracing  her  for  the  sound 
of  it;  than  which  I  can  imagine  no  more  expres 
sive  tribute  to  our  constant  depths  of  indebtedness. 
She  lived  in  ourselves  so  exclusively,  with  such  a 
want  of  use  for  anything  in  her  consciousness  that 
was  not  about  us  and  for  us,  that  I  think  we 
almost  contested  her  being  separate  enough  to  be 
proud  of  us  —  it  was  too  like  our  being  proud  of 
ourselves.  We  were  delightedly  derisive  with  her 
even  about  pride  in  our  father  —  it  was  the  most 
domestic  of  our  pastimes;  for  what  really  could 
exceed  the  tenderness  of  our  fastening  on  her 
that  she  was  he,  was  each  of  us,  was  our  pride 
and  our  humility,  our  possibility  of  any  relation, 
and  the  very  canvas  itself  on  which  we  were 


180    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

floridly  embroidered?  How  can  I  better  express 
what  she  seemed  to  do  for  her  second  son  in 
especial  than  by  saying  that  even  with  her 
deepest  delicacy  of  attention  present  I  could 
still  feel,  while  my  father  read,  why  it  was  that  I 
most  of  all  seemed  to  wish  we  might  have  been 
either  much  less  religious  or  much  more  so? 
Was  not  the  reason  at  bottom  that  I  so  suffered, 
I  might  almost  have  put  it,  under  the  impression 
of  his  style,  which  affected  me  as  somehow  too 
philosophic  for  life,  and  at  the  same  time  too 
living,  as  I  made  out,  for  thought?  —  since  I  must 
weirdly  have  opined  that  by  so  much  as  you  were 
individual,  which  meant  personal,  which  meant 
monotonous,  which  meant  limitedly  allusive  and 
verbally  repetitive,  by  so  much  you  were  not 
literary  or,  so  to  speak,  largely  figurative.  My 
father  had  terms,  evidently  strong,  but  in  which 
I  presumed  to  feel,  with  a  shade  of  irritation, 
a  certain  narrowness  of  exclusion  as  to  images 
otherwise  —  and  oh,  since  it  was  a  question  of  the 
pen,  so  multitudinously !  —  entertainable.  Variety, 
variety  —  that  sweet  ideal,  that  straight  contradic 
tion  of  any  dialectic,  hummed  for  me  all  the  while 
as  a  direct,  if  perverse  and  most  unedified,  effect 
of  the  parental  concentration,  with  some  of  its 
consequent,  though  heedless,  dissociations./  I 
heard  it,  felt  it,  saw  it,  both  shamefully  enjoyed 
and  shamefully  denied  it  as  form,  though  as  form 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     181 

only;  and  I  owed  thus  supremely  to  my  mother 
that  I  could,  in  whatever  obscure  levity,  muddle 
out  some  sense  of  my  own  preoccupation  under 
the  singular  softness  of  the  connection  that  she 
kept  for  me,  by  the  outward  graces,  with  that 
other  and  truly  much  intenser  which  I  was  so 
little  framed  to  share. 

If  meanwhile  my  father's  tone,  so  far  as  that 
went,  was  to  remain  the  same,  save  for  a  natural 
growth  of  assurance,  and  thereby  of  amplitude, 
all  his  life,  I  find  it  already,  and  his  very  voice 
as  we  were  to  know  them,  in  a  letter  to  R.  W. 
Emerson  of  1842,  without  more  specific  date, 
after  the  loose  fashion  of  those  days,  but  from 
2  Washington  Place,  New  York,  the  second  house 
in  the  row  between  the  University  building  and 
Broadway,  as  he  was  next  to  note  to  his  corre 
spondent  in  expressing  the  hope  of  a  visit  from 
him.  (It  was  the  house  in  which,  the  following 
year,  his  second  son  was  born.) 

I  came  home  to-night  from  my  lecture  a  little  dis 
posed  to  think,  from  the  smart  reduction  of  my  audi 
ence,  that  I  had  about  as  well  not  have  prepared  my 
course,  especially  as  I  get  no  tidings  of  having  inter 
ested  one  of  the  sort  (the  religious)  for  whom  they 
are  wholly  designed.  When  I  next  see  you  I  want  a 
half-hour's  support  from  you  under  this  discourage 
ment,  and  the  purpose  of  this  letter  is  to  secure  it. 
When  I  am  with  you  I  get  no  help  from  you  —  of  the 
sort  you  can  give  me,  I  feel  sure;  though  you  must 


182    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

know  what  I  want  before  I  listen  to  you  next.  Usually 
the  temper  you  show,  of  perfect  repose  and  candour, 
free  from  all  sickening  partisanship  and  full  of  mag 
nanimous  tenderness  for  every  creature,  makes  me 
forget  my  wants  in  your  lavish  plenty.  But  I  know 
you  have  the  same  as  I  have,  deep  down  in  your 
breast,  and  it  is  by  these  I  would  fain  know  you.  I 
am  led,  quite  without  any  conscious  wilfulness  either, 
to  seek  the  laws  of  these  appearances  that  swim  round 
us  in  God's  great  museum,  to  get  hold  of  some  central 
facts  which  may  make  all  other  facts  properly  circum 
ferential  and  orderly;  and  you  continually  dishearten 
me  by  your  apparent  indifference  to  such  law  and 
such  facts,  by  the  dishonour  you  seem  to  cast  on  our 
intelligence  as  if  it  were  what  stands  in  our  way. 
Now  my  conviction  is  that  my  intelligence  is  the  neces 
sary  digestive  apparatus  for  my  life;  that  there  is 
nihil  in  vita  —  worth  anything,  that  is  —  quod  non 
prius  in  intellectu.  Now  is  it  not  so  in  truth  with 
you?  Can  you  not  report  your  life  to  me  by  some 
intellectual  symbol  which  my  intellect  appreciates? 
Do  you  not  know  your  activity?  But  fudge  —  I  can 
not  say  what  I  want  to  say,  what  aches  to  say  itself 
in  me,  and  so  I'll  hold  up  till  I  see  you,  and  try  once 
more  to  get  some  better  furtherance  by  my  own  effort. 
Here  I  am  these  thirty-one  years  in  life,  ignorant  in 
all  outward  science,  but  having  patient  habits  of 
meditation  which  never  know  disgust  or  weariness,  and 
feeling  a  force  of  impulsive  love  toward  all  humanity 
which  will  not  let  me  rest  wholly  mute,  a  force  which 
grows  against  all  resistance  that  I  can  muster  against 
it.  What  shall  I  do?  Shall  I  get  me  a  little  nook  in 
the  country  and  communicate  with  my  living  kind  - 
not  my  talking  kind  —  by  life  only;  a  word  perhaps  of 
that  communication,  a  fit  word  once  a  year?  Or  shall  I 
follow  some  commoner  method — learn  science  and  bring 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    183 

myself  first  into  man's  respect,  that  I  may  thus  the  bet 
ter  speak  to  him?  I  confess  this  last  theory  seems 
rank  with  earthliness  —  to  belong  to  days  forever  past. 

His  appeal  to  Emerson  at  this  hour  was,  as  he 
elsewhere  then  puts  it,  to  the  "invisible"  man 
in  the  matter,  who  affected  him  as  somewhere 
behind  the  more  or  less  immediately  visible,  the 
beautifully  but  mystifyingly  audible,  the  Emerson 
of  honeyed  lectures  and  addresses,  suggestive 
and  inspiring  as  that  one  might  be,  and  who 
might,  as  we  say  to-day,  have  something,  some 
thing  more  at  least,  for  him.  "I  will  tell  him 
that  I  do  not  value  his  substantive  discoveries, 
whatever  they  may  be,  perhaps  half  so  largely 
as  he  values  them,  but  that  I  chiefly  cherish  that 
/erect  attitude  of  mind  in  him  which  in  God's 
universe  undauntedly  seeks  the  worthiest  tidings 
of  God,  and  calmly  defies  every  mumbling 
phantom  which  would  challenge  its  freedom. 
Should  his  zeal  for  realities  and  contempt  of 
vulgar  shows  abide  the  ordeal  I  have  thus  con 
trived  for  them  I  shall  gladly  await  his  visit  to 
me.  So  much  at  least  is  what  I  have  been  saying 
to  myself.  Now  that  I  have  told  it  to  you  also 
you  have  become  a  sort  of  confidant  between  me 
and  myself,  and  so  bound  to  promote  harmony 
there."  The  correspondence  expands,  however, 
beyond  my  space  for  reporting  of  it;  I  but  pick 
out  a  few  passages. 


184    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

I  am  cheered  by  the  coming  of  Carlyle's  new  book, 
which  Greeley  announces,  and  shall  hasten  off  for  it 
as  soon  as  I  have  leisure.1  The  title  is  provokingly 
enigmatical,  but  thought  enough  there  will  be  in  it 
no  doubt,  whatever  the  name;  thought  heaped  up  to 
topheaviness  and  inevitable  lopsidedness,  but  more  in 
teresting  to  me  than  comes  from  any  other  quarter  of 
Europe  —  interesting  for  the  man's  sake  whom  it 
shows.  According  to  my  notion  he  is  the  very  best 
interpreter  of  a  spiritual  philosophy  that  could  be 
devised  for  this  age,  the  age  of  transition  and  conflict; 
and  what  renders  him  so  is  his  natural  birth-and- 
education-place.  Just  to  think  of  a  Scotchman  with 
a  heart  widened  to  German  spiritualities!  To  have 
overcome  his  educational  bigotries  far  enough  to  listen 
to  the  new  ideas,  this  by  itself  was  wonderful;  and 
then  to  give  all  his  native  shrewdness  and  humour  to 
the  service  of  making  them  tell  to  the  minds  of  his 
people  —  what  more  fortunate  thing  for  the  time  could 
there  be?  You  don't  look  upon  Calvinism  as  a  fact 
at  all;  wherein  you  are  to  my  mind  philosophically 
infirm  —  impaired  in  your  universality.  I  can  see  in 
Carlyle  the  advantage  his  familiarity  with  it  gives  him 
over  you  with  a  general  audience.  What  is  highest 
in  him  is  built  upon  that  lowest.  At  least  so  I  read; 
I  believe  Jonathan  Edwards  redivivus  in  true  blue 
would,  after  an  honest  study  of  the  philosophy  that 
has  grown  up  since  his  day,  make  the  best  possible 
reconciler  and  critic  of  this  philosophy  —  far  better 
than  Schelling  redivivus. 

In  the  autumn  of  1843  the  "nook  in  the 
country"  above  alluded  to  had  become  a  question 
renounced,  so  far  at  least  as  the  American  country 

1  Past  and  Present,  1843. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    185 

was  concerned,  and  never  again  afterwards  flushed 
into  life.  "I  think  it  probable  I  shall  winter  in 
some  mild  English  climate,  Devonshire  perhaps, 
and  go  on  with  my  studies  as  at  home.  I  shall 
miss  the  stimulus  of  your  candid  and  generous 
society,  and  I  confess  we  don't  like  the  aspect  of 
the  journey;  but  one's  destiny  puts  on  many 
garments  as  it  goes  shaping  itself  in  secret  —  so 
let  us  not  cling  to  any  particular  fashion."  Very 
marked,  and  above  all  very  characteristic  of  my 
father,  in  this  interesting  relation,  which  I  may 
but  so  imperfectly  illustrate,  his  constant  appeal 
to  his  so  inspired,  yet  so  uninflamed,  so  irreducible 
and,  as  it  were,  inapplicable,  friend  for  intel 
lectual  and,  as  he  would  have  said,  spiritual  help 
of  the  immediate  and  adjustable,  the  more 
concretely  vital,  kind,  the  kind  translatable  into 
terms  of  the  real,  the  particular  human  terms  of 
action  and  passion.  "Oh  you  man  without  a 
handlel  Shall  one  never  be  able  to  help  himself 
out  of  you,  according  to  his  needs,  and  be  depen 
dent  only  upon  your  fitful  tippings-up?"  -a 
remarkably  felicitous  expression,  as  it  strikes  me, 
of  that  difficulty  often  felt  by  the  passionately- 
living  of  the  earlier  time,  as  they  may  be  called, 
to  draw  down  their  noble  philosopher's  great 
overhanging  heaven  of  universal  and  ethereal 
answers  to  the  plane  of  their  comparatively 
terrestrial  and  personal  questions;  the  note  of 


186     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

the  answers  and  their  great  anticipatory  spirit 
being  somehow  that  they  seemed  to  anticipate 
everything  but  the  unaccommodating  individual 
case.  My  father,  on  his  side,  bristled  with 
"handles"  -  there  could  scarce  be  a  better  general 
account  of  him  —  and  tipped  himself  up  for  you 
almost  before  you  could  take  hold  of  one;  of 
which  truth,  for  that  matter,  this  same  letter 
happens  to  give,  even  if  just  trivially,  the  hint. 
"Can  I  do  anything  for  you  in  the  way  of  taking 
parcels,  no  matter  how  large  or  expensive?  —  or 
for  any  of  your  friends?  If  you  see  Margaret 
Fuller  ask  her  to  give  me  some  service  to  render 
her  abroad,  the  dear  noble  woman:  it  seems  a 
real  hardship  to  be  leaving  the  country  now  that 
I  have  just  come  to  talk  with  her."  Emerson,  I 
should  add,  did  offer  personally  so  solid  a  handle 
that  my  father  appears  to  have  taken  from  him 
two  introductions  to  be  made  use  of  in  London, 
one  to  Carlyle  and  the  other  to  John  Sterling,  the 
result  of  which  shortly  afterwards  was  as  vivid 
and  as  deeply  appropriated  an  impression  of  each 
eminent  character  as  it  was  probably  to  be  given 
either  of  them  ever  to  have  made.  The  impres 
sion  of  Carlyle  was  recorded  but  long  subsequently, 
I  note,  and  is  included  in  William's  gathering-in 
of  our  father's  Literary  Remains  (1885);  and  of 
the  acquaintance  with  Sterling  no  reflection 
remains  but  a  passage  in  a  letter,  under  date  of 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    187 

Ventnor  and  of  the  winter  of  1843,  from  the 
latter  to  his  biographer  to  be;  Carlyle  having 
already  mentioned  in  the  Life  that  "Two  Ameri 
can  gentlemen,  acquaintances  also  of  mine,  had 
been  recommended  to  him,  by  Emerson  most 
likely";  and  that  "one  morning  Sterling  ap 
peared  here  with  a  strenuous  proposal  that  we 
should  come  to  Knightsbridge  and  dine  with 
him  and  them.  .  .  .  And  accordingly  we  went," 
it  goes  on.  "I  remember  it  as  one  of  the  saddest 
dinners;  though  Sterling  talked  copiously,  and 
our  friends,  Theodore  Parker  one  of  them,  were 
pleasant  and  distinguished  men."  My  father, 
with  Theodore  Parker  his  friend  and  the  date 
fitting,  would  quite  seem  to  have  been  one  of  the 
pair  were  it  not  that  "our  conversation  was 
waste  and  logical,  I  forget  quite  on  what,  not 
joyful  and  harmoniously  effusive."  It  is  that 
that  doesn't  fit  with  any  real  participation  of 
his  —  nothing  could  well  do  less  so;  unless  the 
occasion  had  but  too  closely  conformed  to  the 
biographer's  darkly  and  richly  prophetic  view 
of  it  as  tragic  and  ominous,  "sad  as  if  one  had 
been  dining  in  a  ruin,  in  the  crypt  of  a  mauso 
leum"  -all  this  "painfully  apparent  through 
the  bright  mask  (Sterling)  had  bound  himself  to 
wear."  The  end  of  his  life  was  then,  to  Carlyle's 
view,  in  sight;  but  his  own  note,  in  the  Isle 
of  Wight,  on  "Mr.  James,  your  New-England 


188    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

friend,"  was  genial  enough-  "I  saw  him  several 
times  and  liked  him.  They  went  on  the  24th  of 
last  month  back  to  London  —  or  so  purposed," 
he  adds,  "because  there  is  no  pavement  here  for 
him  to  walk  on.  I  want  to  know  where  he  is, 
and  thought  I  should  be  able  to  learn  from  you. 
I  gave  him  a  note  for  Mill,  who  may  perhaps 
have  seen  him." 

My  main  interest  in  which  is,  I  confess,  for  the 
far-off  germ  of  the  odd  legend,  destined  much  to 
grow  later  on,  that  —  already  the  nucleus  of  a 
household  —  we  were  New  England  products; 
which  I  think  my  parents  could  then  have  even 
so  much  as  seemed  only  to  eyes  naturally  un 
aware  of  our  American  "sectional"  differences. 
My  father,  when  considerably  past  his  thirtieth 
year,  if  I  am  not  mistaken,  had  travelled  "East," 
within  our  borders,  but  once  in  his  life  —  on  the 
occasion  of  his  spending  two  or  three  months  in 
Boston  as  a  very  young  man;  there  connecting 
itself  with  this  for  me  a  reminiscence  so  bedimmed 
at  once  and  so  suggestive  as  now  almost  to 
torment  me.  It  must  have  been  in  '67  or  '68 
that,  giving  him  my  arm,  of  a  slippery  Boston 
day,  up  or  down  one  of  the  steep  streets  that 
used  to  mount,  from  behind,  and  as  slightly 
sullen  with  the  effort,  to  Beacon  Hill,  and  between 
which  my  now  relaxed  memory  rather  fails  to 
discriminate,  I  was  arrested  by  his  pointing  out 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     189 

to  me  opposite  us  a  house  in  which  he  had  for  a 
while  had  rooms,  long  before  and  quite  in  his 
early  time.  I  but  recall  that  we  were  more  or 
less  skirting  the  base  of  an  ancient  town-reservoir, 
the  seat  of  the  water-supply  as  then  constituted, 
a  monument  rugged  and  dark,  massively  granitic, 
perched  all  perversely,  as  it  seemed  to  look,  on 
the  precipitous  slope,  and  which  —  at  least  as  I 
see  it  through  the  years  —  struck  quite  hand 
somely  the  Babylonian  note.  I  at  any  rate  mix 
up  with  this  frowning  object  —  it  had  somehow 
a  sinister  presence  and  suggestion  —  my  com 
panion's  mention  there  in  front  of  it  that  he  had 
anciently  taken  refuge  under  its  shadow  from 
certain  effects  of  a  misunderstanding,  if  indeed 
not  of  a  sharp  rupture,  for  the  time,  with  a  highly 
generous  but  also  on  occasion  strongly  protesting 
parent  at  Albany,  a  parent  displeased  with  some 
course  he  had  taken  or  had  declined  to  take 
(there  was  a  tradition  among  us  that  he  had  been 
for  a  period  quite  definitely  "wild"),  and  relief 
from  further  discussion  with  whom  he  had  sought, 
and  had  more  or  less  found,  on  that  spot.  It 
was  an  age  in  which  a  flight  from  Albany  to 
Boston  —  there  being  then  no  Boston  and  Albany 
Railroad  —  counted  as  a  far  flight;  though  it 
wasn't  to  occur  to  me  either  then  or  afterwards 
that  the  ground  of  this  manoeuvre  had  been  any 
plotted  wildness  in  the  Puritan  air.  What  was 


190     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

clear  at  the  moment,  and  what  he  remarked  upon, 
was  that  the  street-scene  about  us  showed  for 
all  the  lapse  of  time  no  scrap  of  change,  and  I 
remember  well  for  myself  how  my  first  impression 
of  Boston  gave  it  to  me  under  certain  aspects  as 
more  expressive  than  I  had  supposed  an  American 
city  could  be  of  a  seated  and  rooted  social  order, 
an  order  not  complex  but  sensibly  fixed  —  gathered 
in  or  folded  back  to  intensity  upon  itself;  and 
this,  again  and  again,  when  the  compass  of  the 
posture,  its  narrow  field,  might  almost  have  made 
the  fold  excruciating.  It  had  given  however  no 
sign  of  excruciation  —  that  itself  had  been  part  of 
the  Puritan  stoicism;  which  perhaps  was  exactly 
why  the  local  look,  recognised  to  the  point  I 
speak  of.  by  the  visitor,  was  so  contained  and 
yet  comparatively  so  full:  full,  very  nearly,  I 
originally  fancied,  after  the  appraisable  fashion 
of  some  composed  town-face  in  one  of  Balzac's 
miles  de  province.  All  of  which,  I  grant,  is  much 
to  say  for  the  occasion  of  that  dropped  confidence, 
on  the  sloshy  hillside,  to  which  I  allude  —  and  part 
of  the  action  of  which  was  that  it  had  never  been 
dropped  before;  this  circumstance  somehow  a 
peculiar  source  of  interest,  an  interest  I  the  more 
regret  to  have  lost  my  grasp  of  as  it  must  have 
been  sharp,  or  in  other  words  founded,  to  account 
for  the  long  reverberation  here  noted.  I  had 
still  —  as  I  was  indeed  to  keep  having  through  life 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    191 

-the  good  fortune  that  elements  of  interest 
easily  sprang,  to  my  incurable  sense,  from  any 
ghost  of  a  drama  at  all  presented',  though  I  of 
course  can't  in  the  least  pretend  to  generalise  on 
what  may  or  may  not  have  constituted  living 
presentation.  This  felicity  occurred,  I  make  out, 
quite  .incalculably,  just  as  it  could  or  would; 
the  effect  depended  on  some  particular  touch  of 
the  spring,  which  was  set  in  motion  the  instant 
the  touch  happened  to  be  right.  My  father's  was 
always  right,  to  my  receptive  mind;  as  receptive, 
that  is,  of  any  scrap  of  enacted  story  or  evoked 
picture  as  it  was  closed  to  the  dry  or  the  abstract 
proposition;  so  that  I  blush  the  deeper  at  not 
being  able,  in  honour  of  his  reference,  to  make 
the  latter  more  vividly  flower  —  I  still  so  feel  that 
I  quite  thrilled  with  it  and  with  the  standing 
background  at  the  moment  lighted  by  it.  There 
were  things  in  it,  and  other  persons,  old  actu 
alities,  old  meanings  and  furnishings  of  the  other 
old  Boston,  as  I  by  that  time  couldn't  but 
appraise  it;  and  the  really  archaic,  the  overhung 
and  sombre  and  secret-keeping  street,  "socially" 
disconnected,  socially  mysterious  —  as  I  like  at 
any  rate  to  remember  it  —  was  there  to  testify 
(testify  to  the  ancient  time  of  tension,  expansion, 
sore  meditation  or  whatever)  by  its  positively 
conscious  gloom. 

The  moral   of  this,   I   fear,   amounts   to   little 


192    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

more  than  that,  putting  aside  the  substance  of 
his  anecdote,  my  father  had  not  set  foot  in  New 
England  till  toward  his  thirty-fifth  year,  and  my 
mother  was  not  to  do  so  till  later  still;  circum 
stances  not  in  the  least  preventing  the  birth  of 
what  I  have  called  the  falsifying  legend.  The 
allusion  to  the  walking  at  Ventnor  touches  his 
inability  to  deal  with  rural  roads  and  paths, 
then  rougher  things  than  now;  by  reason  of  an 
accident  received  in  early  youth  and  which  had 
so  lamed  him  for  life  that  he  could  circulate  to 
any  convenience  but  on  even  surfaces  and  was 
indeed  mainly  reduced  to  driving  —  it  had  made 
him  for  all  his  earlier  time  an  excellent  whip. 
His  constitution  had  been  happily  of  the  strongest, 
but  as  I  look  back  I  see  his  grave  disability,  which 
it  took  a  strong  constitution  to  carry,  mainly  in 
the  light  of  a  consistency  of  patience  that  we 
were  never  to  have  heard  broken.  The  two 
acceptances  melt  together  for  me  —  that  of  the 
limits  of  his  material  action,  his  doing  and 
enjoying,  set  so  narrowly,  and  that  of  his  scant 
allowance  of  "public  recognition,"  or  of  the 
support  and  encouragement  that  spring,  and 
spring  so  naturally  and  rightly,  when  the  relation 
of  effect  to  cause  is  close  and  straight,  from  any 
at  all  attested  and  glad  understanding  of  a 
formula,  as  we  say  nowadays  a  message,  richly 
and  sincerely  urged.  Too  many  such  reflections, 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    193 

however,  beset  me  here  by  the  way.  My  letters 
jump  meanwhile  to  the  summer  of  1849,  when  I 
find  in  another  of  them,  addressed  to  Emerson, 
a  passage  as  characteristic  as  possible  of  one  of 
the  writer's  liveliest  and,  as  I  confess  it  was  ever 
to  seem  to  me,  most  genially  perverse  idiosyn 
crasies,  his  distinctly  low  opinion  of  "mere" 
literary  men.  This  note  his  letters  in  general 
again  and  again  strike  —  not  a  little  to  the  diver 
sion  of  those  who  were  to  have  observed  and 
remembered  his  constant  charmed  subjection, 
in  the  matter  of  practice,  to  the  masters,  even 
quite  the  lighter,  in  the  depreciated  group.  His 
sensibility  to  their  spell  was  in  fact  so  marked 
that  it  became  from  an  early  time  a  household 
game  with  us  to  detect  him  in  evasive  tears  over 
their  pages,  when  these  were  either  real  or 
romantic  enough,  and  to  publish  without  mercy 
that  he  had  so  been  caught.  There  was  a  period 
in  particular  during  which  this  pastime  enjoyed, 
indeed  quite  revelled  in,  the  form  of  our  dragging 
to  the  light,  with  every  circumstance  of  derision, 
the  fact  of  his  clandestine  and  deeply  moved 
perusal  of  G.  P.  R.  James,  our  nominal  congener, 
at  that  time  ceasing  to  be  prescribed.  It  was 
his  plea,  in  the  "'fifties,"  that  this  romancer  had 
been  his  idol  in  the  'forties  and  the  'thirties,  and 
that  under  renewed,  even  if  but  experimental, 
surrender  the  associations  of  youth  flocked  back 


194    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

to  life  —  so  that  we,  profane  about  the  unduly 
displaced  master,  were  deplorably  the  poorer. 
He  loved  the  novel  in  fine,  he  followed  its  constant 
course  in  the  Revue  with  a  beautiful  inconse 
quence,  and  the  more  it  was  literature  loved  it 
the  better,  which  was  just  how  he  loved,  as  well, 
criticism  and  journalism;  the  particular  instance, 
with  him,  once  he  was  in  relation  with  it,  quite 
sufficiently  taking  care  of  the  invidiously-viewed 
type  —  as  this  was  indeed  viewed  but  a  priori  and 
at  its  most  general  —  and  making  him  ever  so 
cheerfully  forget  to  be  consistent.  Work  was 
verily  cut  out  for  the  particular  instance,  as 
against  the  type,  in  an  air  and  at  a  time  favour 
ing  so,  again  and  again,  and  up  and  down  the 
"literary  world,"  a  dire  mediocrity.  It  was  the 
distillers  of  that  thinness,  the  "mere"  ones,  that 
must  have  been  present  to  him  when  he  wrote 
to  Emerson  in  1849:  "There  is  nothing  I  dread 
so  much  as  literary  men,  especially  our  literary 
men;  catch  them  out  of  the  range  of  mere 
personal  gossip  about  authors  and  books  and 
ask  them  for  honest  sympathy  in  your  sentiment, 
or  for  an  honest  repugnancy  of  it,  and  you  will 
find  the  company  of  stage-drivers  sweeter  and 
more  comforting  to  your  soul.  In  truth  the 
questions  which  are  beginning  to  fill  the  best 
books,  and  will  fill  the  best  for  a  long  time  to 
come,  are  not  related  to  what  we  have  called 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    195 

literature,  and  are  as  well  judged  —  I  think 
better  —  by  those  whom  books  have  at  all  events 
not  belittled.  When  a  man  lives 9  that  is  lives 
enough,  he  can  scarcely  write.  He  cannot  read, 
I  apprehend,  at  all.  All  his  writing  will  be 
algebraicised,  put  into  the  form  of  sonnets  and 
proverbs,  and  the  community  will  feel  itself 
insulted  to  be  offered  a  big  bunch  of  pages,  as 
though  it  were  stupid  and  wanted  tedious  drilling 
like  a  child."  When  I  begin  to  quote  my  father, 
however,  I  hang  over  him  perhaps  even  too 
historically;  for  his  expression  leads  me  on  and 
on  so  by  its  force  and  felicity  that  I  scarce  know 
where  to  stop.  "The  fact  is  that  I  am  afraid  I 
am  in  a  very  bad  way,  for  I  cannot  heartily  engage 
in  any  topic  in  which  I  shall  appear  to  advantage" 

-  the  question  having  been,  de  part  et  d'autre,  of 
possible  courses  of  lectures  for  which  the  appe 
tite  of  New  York  and  Boston  already  announced 
itself  as  of  the  largest.  And  it  still  more  beguiles 
me  that  "my  wife  and  I  are  obliged  —  so  numerous 
has  waxed  our  family --to  enlarge  our  house  in 
town  and  get  a  country  house  for  the  summer." 
Here  came  in  that  earnest  dream  of  the  solutional 
"Europe"  with  which  I  have  elsewhere  noted 
that  my  very  youngest  sensibility  was  fed. 

'These  things  look  expensive  and  temporary  to 
us,  besides  being  an  additional  care;  and  so, 
considering  with  much  pity  our  four  stout  boys, 


196    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

who  have  no  play-room  within  doors  and  import 
shocking  bad  manners  from  the  street,  we  gravely 
ponder  whether  it  wouldn't  be  better  to  go 
abroad  for  a  few  years  with  them,  allowing  them 
to  absorb  French  and  German  and  get  such  a 
sensuous  education  as  they  can't  get  here." 

In  1850,  however,  we  had  still  not  departed 
for  Europe  —  as  we  were  not  to  do  for  several 
years  yet;  one  advantage  of  which  was  that  my 
father  remained  for  the  time  in  intercourse  by 
letter  with  his  English  friend  Dr.  J.  J.  Garth 
Wilkinson,  first  known  during  my  parents'  con 
siderable  stay  in  London  of  several  years  before, 
1843-44;  and  whose  admirable  style  of  expres 
sion,  in  its  way  as  personal  and  as  vivid  as  Henry 
James's  own,  with  an  added  and  doubtless  more 
perceptibly  full-blooded  massiveness,  is  so  at 
tested  by  his  earlier  writings,1  to  say  nothing  of 
the  rich  collection  of  his  letters  (1845-55)  lately 
before  me  —  notably  by  The  Human  Body  and  its 


Sir,  we  have  yet  one  more  scene  to  visit  together,  connected 
with  all  we  have  previously  witnessed:  a  home  scene,  Sir  Benjamin;  and 
we  must  now  ascend  a  mountain  of  pity  high  enough  to  command  the  dewy 
extense  of  three  kingdoms.  From  thence  we  have  to  look  down  from  every 
point  of  our  warm  hearts  with  a  sight  as  multifold  as  the  cherubic  eyes. 
We  are  to  see  with  equal  penetration  through  the  diverse  thickness  of 
castles,  mansions,  and  cottages,  through  London  and  through  hamlet,  at 
young  wives  and  at  aged  mothers,  little  children,  brothers  and  sisters  —  all 
groups  and  ties  that  are;  and  at  affianced  maidens,  ties  that  were  to  be. 
There  are  rents  and  tears  to-day  in  the  general  life:  the  bulletin  of  the 
dead  has  come,  and  the  groups  of  sorrow  are  constituted.  Splendid  Paris 
bends  as  a  Niobe  or  as  a  Rachel  while  the  corse  of  her  much-enduring 
Hero  is  borne  to  the  marble  Invalides;  other  corses  go  earthward  with  a 
shorter  procession,  helped  away  by  the  spades  of  ruder  but  more  instant 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    197 

Connection  with  Man,  dedicated  in  1851  to  my 
father  —  that  I  wonder  at  the  absence  of  such  a 
master,  in  more  than  one  happy  specimen,  from 
the  common  educational  exhibitions  of  English 
prose.  Dr.  Wilkinson  was  a  friend  of  Emerson's 
as  well,  which  leads  the  latter's  New  York 
correspondent  to  cite  to  him  in  February  1850 
a  highly  characteristic  passage  from  one  of  the 
London  communications. 

Carlyle  came  up  here  (presumably  to  Hampstead)  on 
Monday  to  see  Neuberg,  and  spoke  much  of  you  with 
very  kind  recollections.  He  remembered  your  meta 
physics  also  and  asked  with  terrible  solicitude  whether 
they  yet  persevered.  I  couldn't  absolutely  say  that 
they  did  not,  though  I  did  my  best  to  stammer  out 
something  about  the  great  social  movement.  He  was 
suffering  dreadfully  from  malaise  and  indigestion  and 
gave  with  his  usual  force  his  usual  putrid  theory  of 
the  universe.  All  great  men  were  most  miserable;  the 
day  on  which  any  man  could  say  he  was  not  miser 
able,  that  day  he  was  a  scoundrel;  God  was  a  Divine 
Sorrow;  to  no  moment  could  he,  Carlyle,  ever  say 

sculptors;  the  rucked  sod  of  the  Alma  is  their  urn  and  monument  in  one; 
yet  every  warrior  among  them  is  also  buried  to-day  with  swelling  great 
ness  of  obsequies,  if  we  could  see  them,  in  the  everlasting  ruby  vaults  of 
some  human  heart.  You  are  touched,  Sir  Benjamin,  and  are  justly  re 
ligious  on  this  summit.  Struck  down  for  a  moment  from  worldliness,  we 
both  discourse  without  an  afterthought  on  the  immortal  state;  we  hope 
that  the  brave  are  already  welcomed  in  the  land  of  peace;  that  our  laurels 
they  could  not  stop  to  take,  and  our  earned  promotion  they  seem  to  have 
missed  are  clad  upon  them  now  by  the  God  of  battles  in  front  of  the  shining 
armies  of  the  just.  We  hope  also  that  if  their  voices  could  now  speak  to 
the  mourners,  the  oil  of  their  sure  gladness  would  heal  our  faithless  sorrow. 
It  is  a  true  strain  no  doubt,  and  yet  but  of  momentary  power."  War, 
Cholera,  and  the  Ministry  of  Health.  An  Appeal  to  Sir  Benjamin  Hall 
and  the  British  People.  London,  1854. 


198    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

Linger,  but  only  Goodbye  and  never  let  me  see  your 
face  again.  And  all  this  interpolated  with  convulsive 
laughter,  showing  that  joy  would  come  into  him  were 
it  even  by  the  path  of  hysteria  and  disease.  To  me  he 
is  an  unprofitable  man,  and  though  he  gave  me  the 
most  kind  invitation  I  have  too  much  respect  for  my 
stomach  to  go  much  into  his  company.  Where  hope 
is  feeble  genius  and  the  human  voice  are  on  the  way 
to  die.  By  the  next  boat  I  will  endeavour  to  send 
you  over  my  thoughts  on  his  recent  pamphlet,  the 
first  of  a  series  of  Latter-Day-Tracts.  He  is  very 
rapidly  falling  out  with  all  his  present  admirers,  for 
which  I  like  them  all  the  better;  and  indeed  is  driving 
fast  toward  social  views  —  only  his  is  to  be  a  compul 
sory,  not  an  attractive,  socialism. 

After  quoting  which  my  father  comments: 
"Never  was  anything  more  false  than  this 
worship  of  sorrow  by  Carlyle;  he  has  picked  it 
up  out  of  past  history  and  spouts  it  for  mere 
display,  as  a  virtuoso  delights  in  the  style  of  his 
grandfather.  It  is  the  merest  babble  in  him, 
as  everyone  who  has  ever  talked  an  hour  with 
him  will  acquit  him  of  the  least  grain  of  humility. 
A  man  who  has  once  uttered  a  cry  of  despair 
should  ever  after  clothe  himself  in  sackcloth 
and  ashes." 

The  writer  was  to  have  meanwhile,  before 
our  migration  of  1855,  a  considerable  lecturing 
activity.  A  confused,  yet  perfectly  recoverable 
recollection,  on  my  own  part,  of  these  years, 
connects  itself  with  our  knowledge  that  our 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    199 

father  engaged  in  that  practice  and  that  he  went 
forth  for  the  purpose,  with  my  mother  always 
in  earnest  and  confident  even  though  slightly 
fluttered  attendance,  at  about  the  hour  of  our 
upward  procession  to  bed;  which  fact  lent  to  the 
proceeding  —  that  is  to  his  —  a  strange  air  of 
unnatural  riot,  quite  as  of  torch-lighted  and 
wind-blown  dissipation.  We  went  to  plays  and 
to  ballets,  and  they  had  comparatively  speaking 
no  mystery;  but  at  no  lecture  had  we  ever  been 
present,  and  these  put  on  for  my  fancy  at  least  a 
richer  light  and  shade,  very  much  as  if  we  our 
selves  had  been  on  the  performing  side  of  the 
curtain,  or  the  wonder  of  admiring  (in  our 
mother's  person)  and  of  being  admired  (in  our 
father's)  had  been  rolled  for  us  into  a  single  glory. 
This  glory  moreover  was  not  menaced,  but  only 
made  more  of  a  thrill  by  the  prime  admirer's 
anxiety,  always  displayed  at  the  last,  as  to 
whether  they  were  not  starting  without  the 
feature  of  features,  the  corpus  delicti  or  manu 
script  itself;  which  it  was  legendary  with  us 
that  the  admired  had  been  known  to  drive  back 
for  in  an  abashed  flurry  at  the  moment  we  were 
launched  in  dreams  of  him  as  in  full,  though 
mysterious,  operation.  I  can  see  him  now,  from 
the  parlour  window,  at  the  door  of  the  carriage 
and  under  the  gusty  street-lamp,  produce  it  from 
a  coat-tail  pocket  and  shake  it,  for  her  ideal 


200     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

comfort,  in  the  face  of  his  companion.  The 
following,  to  Emerson,  I  surmise,  is  of  some 
early  date  in  the  autumn  of  '52. 


I  give  three  lectures  in  Boston  at  the  Masonic 
Temple;  the  first  and  second  on  Nov.  5th  and  8th 
respectively.  I  should  be  greatly  appalled  in  some 
respects,  but  still  charmed,  to  have  you  for  an  auditor, 
seeing  thus  a  hundred  empty  seats  obliterated;  but, 
I  beg  of  you,  don't  let  any  engagement  suffer  by  such 
kindness  to  me.  Looking  over  the  lectures  again 
they  horrify  me  with  their  loud-mouthed  imbecility! 
-  but  I  hope  they  may  fall  upon  less  hardened  ears 
in  some  cases.  I  am  sure  that  the  thought  which  is 
in  them,  or  rather  seems  to  me  to  struggle  to  be  in 
them,  is  worthy  of  all  men's  rapturous  homage,  and  I 
will  trust  that  a  glimpse  of  it  may  somehow  befall  my 
patient  auditory.  The  fact  is  that  a  vital  truth  can 
never  be  transferred  from  one  mind  to  another,  be 
cause  life  alone  appreciates  it.  The  most  one  can  do 
for  another  is  to  plant  some  rude  formula  of  such 
truths  in  his  memory,  leaving  his  own  spiritual  chem 
istry  to  set  free  the  germ  whenever  the  demands  of 
his  life  exact  it.  The  reason  why  the  gods  seem  so 
powerless  to  the  sensuous  understanding,  and  suffer 
themselves  to  be  so  long  defamed  by  our  crazy  theol 
ogies,  is  that  they  are  life,  and  can  consequently  be 
revealed  only  to  life.  But  life  is  simply  the  passage 
of  idea  into  action;  and  our  crazy  theologies  forbid 
ideas  to  come  into  action  any  further  than  our  existing 
institutions  warrant.  Hence  man  leads  a  mere  limp 
ing  life,  and  the  poor  gods  who  are  dependent  upon  his 
manliness  for  their  true  revelation  and  for  their  real 
knowledge,  are  doomed  to  remain  forever  unknown, 
and  even  denied  by  such  solemn  pedants  as  Mr.  At- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    201 

kinson  and  Miss  Martineau.  However,  I  shall  try  to 
convert  myself  at  least  into  an  army  of  Goths  and 
Huns,  to  overcome  and  destroy  our  existing  sanctities, 
that  the  supernal  splendours  may  at  length  become 
credible  and  even  visible.  Good-bye  till  we  meet  in 
Boston,  and  cultivate  your  goodnature  according  to 
my  extensive  needs. 

I  bridge  the  interval  before  our  migration  of 
1855  exactly  for  the  sake  of  certain  further 
passages  addressed  to  the  same  correspondent, 
from  London,  in  the  following  year.  The  letter 
is  a  long  one  and  highly  significant  of  the  writer's 
familiar  frankness,  but  I  must  keep  down  my 
examples  —  the  first  of  which  glances  at  his 
general  sense  of  the  men  he  mainly  met. 

They  are  all  of  them  depressed  or  embittered  by  the 
public  embarrassments  that  beset  them;  deflected, 
distorted,  somehow  despoiled  of  their  rich  individual 
manliness  by  the  necessity  of  providing  for  these  im 
becile  old  inheritances  of  church  and  state.  Carlyle 
is  the  same  old  sausage,  fizzing  and  sputtering  in  his 
own  grease,  only  infinitely  more  unreconciled  to  the 
blest  Providence  which  guides  human  affairs.  He 
names  God  frequently  and  alludes  to  the  highest 
things  as  if  they  were  realities,  but  all  only  as  for  a 
picturesque  effect,  so  completely  does  he  seem  to  re 
gard  them  as  habitually  circumvented  and  set  at 
naught  by  the  politicians.  I  took  our  friend  M.  to 
see  him,  and  he  came  away  greatly  distressed  and 
desillusionne,  Carlyle  having  taken  the  utmost  pains 
to  deny  and  descry  and  deride  the  idea  of  his  having 
done  the  least  good  to  anybody,  and  to  profess  indeed 


202    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

the  utmost  contempt  for  everybody  who  thought  he 
had,  and  poor  M.  being  intent  on  giving  him  a  plenary 
assurance  of  this  fact  in  his  own  case.  .  .  .  Arthur 
Helps  seems  an  amiable  kindly  little  man  with  friendly 
offers,  but  I  told  him  I  had  no  intention  to  bore  him, 
and  would  at  most  apply  to  him  when  I  might  want  a 
good  hatter  or  bootmaker.  He  fancied  a  little  —  at 
least  I  thought  this  was  the  case  —  that  I  was  going 
to  make  a  book,  and  might  be  indiscreet  enough  to 
put  him  in !....-  -  disappoints  me,  he  is  so  eaten 
up  with  the  "spirits"  and  all  that.  His  imagination 
is  so  vast  as  to  dwarf  all  the  higher  faculties,  and  his 
sympathy  as  narrow  as  Dr.  Cheever's  or  Brownson's. 
No  reasonable  man,  it  is  true,  likes  the  clergy  or  the 
philosophers,  but  —  —  's  dislike  of  them  seems  as  en 
venomed  as  that  between  rival  tradesmen  or  rival 
beauties.  One  can't  endure  the  nonsense  they  talk,  to 
be  sure,  but  when  one  considers  the  dear  human  mean 
ing  and  effort  struggling  at  the  bottom  of  it  all  one  can 
feel  still  less  any  personal  separation  from  the  men 
themselves.  -'s  sarcasm  is  of  the  fiercest,  and  on 

the  whole  he  is  only  now  at  last  sowing  his  intellectual 
wild  oats  —  he  will  grow  more  genial  in  good  time. 
This  is  it:  I  think  he  is  but  now  finding  his  youth! 
That  which  we  on  our  side  of  the  water  find  so  early 
and  exhaust  so  prodigally  he  has  found  thus  much 
later  —  I  mean  an  emancipation  from  the  shackles  of 
custom;  and  the  kicking  up  of  his  heels  consequently 
is  proportionate  to  his  greater  maturity  of  muscle. 
Mrs.  -  -  is  a  dear  little  goose  of  a  thing,  who  fancies 
the  divine  providence  in  closer  league  with  herself 
than  with  others,  giving  her  intimations  of  events 
about  to  happen  and  endowing  her  with  peculiar  per 
spicacity  in  the  intuition  of  remedies  for  disease; 
and  -  — ,  the  great  brawny  fellow,  sits  by  and  says 
never  a  word  in  abatement  of  this  enormous  domestic 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    203 

inflation,  though  the  visitor  feels  himself  crowded  by 
it  into  the  most  inconsiderable  of  corners.  A  sweet, 
loving,  innocent  woman  like  Mrs.  -  -  oughtn't  to 
grow  egotistical  in  the  company  of  a  truly  wise  man, 
and  this  accordingly  is  another  quarrel  I  have  with 
— .  In  short  I  am  getting  to  the  time  of  life  when 
one  values  one's  friends  for  what  they  are  more  than 
for  what  they  do.  I  am  just  as  much  impressed  as 
ever  by  his  enormous  power,  but  the  goodness  out  of 
which  it  is  born  and  the  wisdom  by  which  it  is  nur 
tured  and  bred  are  things  I  don't  so  much  see. 


The  correspondence  grew  more  interspaced, 
and  with  the  year  1861  and  the  following,  when 
we  were  at  home  again,  became  a  matter  of  the 
occasional  note.  I  have  before  me  a  series  of 
beautiful  examples  of  Emerson's  share  in  it  - 
during  the  earlier  time  copious  enough;  but 
these  belong  essentially  to  another  case.  I  am 
all  but  limited,  for  any  further  show  of  the 
interesting  relation  than  I  have  already  given, 
to  reproducing  a  few  lines  from  Emerson's  Diary, 
passages  unpublished  at  the  moment  I  write, 
and  the  first  of  them  of  April  1850.  "I  have 
made  no  note  of  these  long  weary  absences  at 
New  York  and  Philadelphia.  I  am  a  bad 
traveller,  and  the  hotels  are  mortifications  to  all 
sense  of  well-being  in  me.  The  people  who  fill 
them  oppress  me  with  their  excessive  virility, 
and  would  soon  become  intolerable  if  it  were  not 
for  a  few  friends  who,  like  women,  tempered  the 


204    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

acrid  mass.  Henry  James  was  true  comfort  - 
wise,  gentle,  polished,  with  heroic  manners  and  a 
serenity  like  the  sun."  The  hotels  of  those  days 
may  well  have  been  an  ordeal  —  distinct  to  me 
still,  from  no  few  childish  glimpses  of  their 
bareness  of  ease  and  rudeness  of  acceuil;  yet 
that  our  justly  fastidious  friend  was  not  wholly 
left  to  their  mercy  seems  signified  by  my  not  less 
vivid  remembrance  of  his  staying  with  us  on 
occasion  in  New  York;  some  occasion,  or  occa 
sions,  I  infer,  of  his  coming  on  to  lecture  there. 
Do  I  roll  several  occasions  into  one,  or  amplify 
one  beyond  reason? -- this  last  being  ever,  I 
allow,  the  waiting  pitfall  of  a  chronicler  too 
memory-ridden.  I  "visualise"  at  any  rate  the 
winter  firelight  of  our  back-parlour  at  dusk  and 
the  great  Emerson  --  I  knew  he  was  great,  greater 
than  any  of  our  friends  —  sitting  in  it  between 
my  parents,  before  the  lamps  had  been  lighted, 
as  a  visitor  consentingly  housed  only  could  have 
done,  and  affecting  me  the  more  as  an  apparition 
sinuously  and,  I  held,  elegantly  slim,  benevolently 
aquiline,  and  commanding  a  tone  alien,  beautifully 
alien,  to  any  we  heard  roundabout,  that  he  bent 
this  benignity  upon  me  by  an  invitation  to  draw 
nearer  to  him,  off  the  hearth-rug,  and  know 
myself  as  never  yet,  as  I  was  not  indeed  to  know 
myself  again  for  years,  in  touch  with  the  wonder 
of  Boston.  The  wonder  of  Boston  was  above 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    205 

all  just  then  and  there  for  me  in  the  sweetness 
of  the  voice  and  the  finish  of  the  speech  --  this 
latter  through  a  sort  of  attenuated  emphasis 
which  at  the  same  time  made  sounds  more  im 
portant,  more  interesting  in  themselves,  than  by 
any  revelation  yet  vouchsafed  us.  Was  not  this 
my  first  glimmer  of  a  sense  that  the  human 
tone  could,  in  that  independent  and  original 
way,  be  interesting?  and  didn't  it  for  a  long 
time  keep  me  going,  however  unwittingly,  in 
that  faith,  carrying  me  in  fact  more  or  less  on 
to  my  day  of  recognising  that  it  took  much  more 
than  simply  not  being  of  New  York  to  produce 
the  music  I  had  listened  to.  The  point  was  that, 
however  that  might  be,  I  had  had  given  me  there 
in  the  firelight  an  absolutely  abiding  measure. 
If  I  didn't  know  from  that  hour  forth  quite  all 
it  was  to  not  utter  sounds  worth  mentioning,  I 
make  out  that  I  had  at  least  the  opposite  knowl 
edge.  And  all  by  the  operation  of  those  signal 
moments  —  the  truth  of  which  I  find  somehow 
reflected  in  the  fact  of  my  afterwards  knowing 
one  of  our  household  rooms  for  the  time  —  it  must 
have  been  our  only  guest-chamber  —  as  "Mr. 
Emerson's  room."  The  evening  firelight  played 
so  long  for  me  upon  the  door  —  that  is  to  the 
length  probably  of  three  days,  the  length  of  a 
child's  impression.  But  I  must  not  let  this 
carry  me  beyond  the  second  note  of  the  Diary, 


206    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

this  time  of  May  1852.  "'I  do  not  wish  this  or 
that  thing  my  fortune  will  procure,  I  wish  the 
great  fortune/  said  Henry  James,  and  said  it  in 
the  noblest  sense."  The  report  has  a  beauty  to 
me  without  my  quite  understanding  it;  the 
union  of  the  two  voices  in  it  signifies  quite 
enough.  The  last  very  relevant  echo  of  my 
father's  by  itself,  in  the  connection,  I  hasten  now 
to  find  in  a  communication  that  must  have  been 
of  the  summer  of  1869,  when  Dr.  Wilkinson  paid 
his  only  visit  to  America  —  this  apparently  of  the 
briefest.  The  letter  to  Emerson  from  Cambridge 
notes  that  his  appearance  there  had  been  delayed. 

He  may  come  to-morrow  possibly :  if  in  the  morning 
I  will  telegraph  you;  if  in  the  evening  I  shall  try  to 
keep  him  over  Monday  that  you  may  meet  him  here 
at  dinner  on  that  day.  But  I  fear  this  bothersome 
Sabbath  and  its  motionless  cars  may  play  us  a  trick. 
I  shall  hope  for  a  generous  Monday  all  the  same,  and 
if  that  hope  is  baulked  shall  owe  Sunday  a  black-eye 
-  and  will  pay  my  debt  on  the  first  suitable  occasion, 
I  warrant  you.  What  an  awkward  story  (the  letter 
continues)  The  Nation  to-day  tells  of  Charles  Sumner! 
Charles's  burly  voice  has  always  had  for  me  a  dread 
fully  hollow  sound,  as  if  it  came  from  a  great  copper 
vat,  and  I  have  loved  him  but  with  fear  and  trembling 
accordingly.  Is  he  really,  like  all  American  politicians, 
tricky,  or  is  The  Nation  —  so  careful  about  facts  or 
dinarily  —  only  slanderous?  ....  Carlyle  nowadays 
is  a  palpable  nuisance.  If  he  holds  to  his  present 
mouthing  ways  to  the  end  he  will  find  no  showman 
la-bas  to  match  him,  for  I  hold  Barnum  a  much  more 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    207 

innocent  personage.     I  shouldn't  wonder  if  Barnura      ^ 
grew  regenerate  in  some  far  off  day  by  mere  force  of 
his  democracy.     But  Carlyle's  intellectual  pride  is  so 
stupid  that  one  can  hardly  imagine  anything  able  to 
cope  with  it. 

The  following,  in  so  different  a  key,  is  of  some 
seven  years  earlier  date  —  apparently  '62;  but  I 
have  let  it  stand  over,  for  reasons,  that  it  may 
figure  here  as  the  last  of  the  communications 
addressed  to  Emerson  that  I  shall  cite.  Written 
at  an  hotel,  the  Tremont  House,  in  Boston,  it 
marks  his  having  come  up  from  Newport  for 
attendance  at  some  meeting  of  a  dining-club, 
highly  distinguished  in  composition,  as  it  still 
happily  remains,  of  which  he  was  a  member  - 
though  but  so  occasionally  present  that  this 
circumstance  perhaps  explains  a  little  the  even 
more  than  usual  vivacity  of  his  impression.  Not 
indeed,  I  may  add,  that  mustered  reasons  or  apol 
ogies  were  ever  much  called  for  in  any  case  of  the 
play  of  that  really  prime  note  of  his  spontaneity. 

I  go  to  Concord  in  the  morning,  but  shall  have 
barely  time  to  see  you  there,  even  if  I  do  as  much  as 
that;  so  that  I  can't  forbear  to  say  to  you  now  the 
word  I  wanted  as  to  my  impression  of  yesterday  about 
Hawthorne  and  Ellery  Channing.  Hawthorne  isn't  to 
me  a  prepossessing  figure,  nor  apparently  at  all  an 
enjoying  person  in  any  way:  he  has  all  the  while  the 
look  —  or  would  have  to  the  unknowing  —  of  a  rogue 
who  suddenly  finds  himself  in  a  company  of  detectives. 


208    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

But  in  spite  of  his  rusticity  I  felt  a  sympathy  for  him 
fairly  amounting  to  anguish,  and  couldn't  take  my 
eyes  off  him  all  dinner,  nor  my  rapt  attention:  as  that 
indecisive  little  Dr.  Hedge1  found,  I  am  afraid,  to  his 
cost,  for  I  hardly  heard  a  word  of  what  he  kept  on 
saying  to  me,  and  resented  his  maliciously  putting 
his  artificial  person  between  me  and  the  profitable 
object  of  study.  (It  isn't  however  that  I  now  feel 
any  ill-will  to  him  —  I  could  recommend  anyone  but 
myself  to  go  and  hear  him  preach.  The  thing  was  that 
Hawthorne  seemed  to  me  to  possess  human  substance 
and  not  to  have  dissipated  it  all  away  like  that  cul 
turally  debauched  -  — ,  or  even  like  good  inoffensive 
comforting  Longfellow.)  John  Forbes  and  you  kept 
up  the  human  balance  at  the  other  end  of  the  table, 
but  my  region  was  a  desert  with  H.  for  its  only  oasis. 
It  was  so  pathetic  to  see  him,  contented  sprawling 
Concord  owl  that  he  was  and  always  has  been,  brought 
blindfold  into  that  brilliant  daylight  and  expected 
to  wink  and  be  lively,  like  some  dapper  Tommy  Tit 
mouse.  I  felt  him  bury  his  eyes  in  his  plate  and  eat 
with  such  voracity  that  no  one  should  dare  to  speak 
to  him.  My  heart  broke  for  him  as  his  attenuated 
left-hand  neighbour  kept  putting  forth  his  long  an 
tennae  to  stroke  his  face  and  try  whether  his  eyes 
were  open.  It  was  heavenly  to  see  him  persist  in 
ignoring  the  spectral  smiles  —  in  eating  his  dinner  and 
doing  nothing  but  that,  and  then  go  home  to  his  Con 
cord  den  to  fall  upon  his  knees  and  ask  his  heavenly 
Father  why  it  was  that  an  owl  couldn't  remain  an 
owl  and  not  be  forced  into  the  diversions  of  a  canary. 
I  have  no  doubt  that  all  the  tenderest  angels  saw 
to  his  case  that  night  and  poured  oil  into  his  wounds 
more  soothing  than  gentlemen  ever  know.  W.  Ellery 
Channing  too  seemed  so  human  and  good  —  sweet 

1  An  eminent  Unitarian  pastor. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    209 

as  summer  and  fragrant  as  pinewoods.  He  is  more 
sophisticated  than  Hawthorne  of  course,  but  still  he 
was  kin;  and  I  felt  the  world  richer  by  two  men,  who 
had  not  yet  lost  themselves  in  mere  members  of  so 
ciety.  This  is  what  I  suspect  —  that  we  are  fast 
getting  so  fearful  one  to  another,  we  "members  of 
society"  that  we  shall  ere  long  begin  to  kill  one  an 
other  in  self-defence  and  give  place  in  that  way  at 
last  to  a  more  veracious  state  of  things.  The  old 
world  is  breaking  up  on  all  hands:  the  glimpse  of  the 
everlasting  granite  I  caught  in  H.  and  W.  E.  shows 
me  that  there  is  stock  enough  left  for  fifty  better. 
Let  the  old  impostors  go,  bag  and  baggage,  for  a  very 
real  and  substantial  one  is  aching  to  come  in,  in  which 
the  churl  shall  not  be  exalted  to  a  place  of  dignity,  in 
which  innocence  shall  never  be  tarnished  nor  traf 
ficked  in,  in  which  every  man's  freedom  shall  be  re 
spected  down  to  its  feeblest  filament  as  the  radiant 
altar  of  God.  To  the  angels,  says  Swedenborg,  death 
means  resurrection  to  life;  by  that  necessary  rule  of 
inversion  which  keeps  them  separate  from  us  and  us 
from  them,  and  so  prevents  our  being  mutual  nui 
sances.  Let  us  then  accept  political  and  all  other  dis 
traction  that  chooses  to  come;  because  what  is  dis 
order  and  wrath  and  contention  on  the  surface  is  sure 
to  be  the  greatest  peace  at  the  centre,  working  its  way 
thus  to  a  surface  that  shall  never  be  disorderly. 

But  it  is  in  the  postscript  that  the  mixture  and 
the  transition  strike  me  as  most  inevitable. 

Weren't  you  shocked  at  -  -'s  engagement?  To 
think  of  that  prim  old  snuffers  imposing  himself  on 
that  pure  young  flame!  What  a  world,  what  a  world! 
But  once  we  get  rid  of  Slavery  the  new  heavens  and 
new  earth  will  swim  into  reality. 


210    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

No  better  example  could  there  be,  I  think,  of 
my  father's  remarkable  and  constant  belief, 
proof  against  all  confusion,  in  the  imminence  of  a 
transformation-scene  in  human  affairs  —  "spiritu 
ally"  speaking  of  course  always  —  which  was  to 
be  enacted  somehow  without  gross  or  vulgar 
visibility,  or  at  least  violence,  as  I  have  said,  but 
was  none  the  less  straining  to  the  front,  and  all 
by  reason  of  the  world's  being,  deep  within  and 
at  heart,  as  he  conceived,  so  achingly  anxious 
for  it.  He  had  the  happiness  —  though  not  so 
untroubled,  all  the  while,  doubtless,  as  some  of 
his  declarations  would  appear  to  represent  —  of 
being  able  to  see  his  own  period  and  environment 
as  the  field  of  the  sensible  change,  and  thereby  as 
a  great  historic  hour;  that  is,  I  at  once  subjoin, 
I  more  or  less  suppose  he  had.  His  measure  of 
the  imminent  and  immediate,  of  the  socially  and 
historically  visible  and  sensible  was  not  a  thing 
easy  to  answer  for,  and  when  treated  to  any  one 
of  the  loud  vaticinations  or  particular  revolution 
ary  messages  and  promises  our  age  was  to  have 
so  much  abounded  in,  all  his  sense  of  proportion 
and  of  the  whole,  of  the  real  and  the  ridiculous, 
asserted  itself  with  the  last  emphasis.  In  that 
mixture  in  him  of  faith  and  humour,  criticism 
and  conviction,  that  mark  of  a  love  of  his  kind 
which  fed  on  discriminations  and  was  never  so 
moved  to  a  certain  extravagance  as  by  an 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

exhibited,  above  all  by  a  cultivated  or  in  the 
least  sententious  vagueness  in  respect  to  these, 
dwelt  largely  the  original  charm,  the  peculiarly 
social  and  living  challenge  (in  that  it  was  so 
straight  and  bright  a  reflection  of  life)  of  his  talk 
and  temper.  Almost  all  of  my  father  shines  for 
jne  at  any  rate  in  the  above  passages,  and  in 
another  that  follows,  with  their  so  easy  glide 
from  discrimination,  as  I  have  called  it,  that  is 
from  analytic  play,  in  the  outward  sphere,  to 
serenity  of  synthesis  and  confidence  and  high 
joy  in  the  inward.  It  was  as  if  he  might  have 
liked  so  to  see  his  fellow-humans,  fellow-diners, 
fellow-celebrities  or  whatever,  in  that  acuity  of 
individual  salience,  in  order  to  proceed  thence  to 
some  enormous  final  doubt  or  dry  renouncement  — • 
instead  of  concluding,  on  the  contrary,  and  on 
the  same  free  and  familiar  note,  to  the  eminently 
"worth  while"  character  of  life,  or  its  suscepti 
bility  to  vast  and  happy  conversions.  With 
which  too,  more  than  I  can  say,  have  I  the  sense 
here  of  his  so  finely  contentious  or  genially 
perverse  impulse  to  carry  his  wares  of  observation 
to  the  market  in  which  they  would  on  the  whole 
bring  least  rather  than  most  —  where  his  offering 
them  at  all  would  produce  rather  a  flurry  (there 
might  have  been  markets  in  which  it  had  been 
known  to  produce  almost  a  scandal),  and  where 
he  would  in  fact  give  them  away  for  nothing  if 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

thereby  he  might  show  that  such  produce  grew. 
Never  was  there  more  of  a  case  of  the  direct 
friendliness  to  startling  growths  —  if  so  they 
might  be  held  —  of  the  very  soil  that  lies  under 
our  windows.  I  don't  think  he  liked  to  scandalise 
—  certainly  he  didn't  in  the  least  for  scandal's 
sake;  but  nothing  inspired  him  more  to  the  act 
and  the  pleasure  of  appreciation  for  appropria 
tion,  as  it  might  be  termed,  than  the  deprecating 
attitude  of  others  on  such  ground  —  that  degree 
of  shyness  of  appropriation  on  their  part  which 
practically  left  appreciation  vague.  It  was  true 
that  the  appreciation  for  a  human  use,  as  it  might 
be  called  —  that  is  for  the  high  optimistic  transi 
tion  —  could  here  carry  the  writer  far. 


VII 

I  FIND  markedly  relevant  at  this  point  a  letter 
from  Newport  in  the  autumn  of  '61  to  another 
correspondent,  one    of  a  series  several  other 
examples  of  which  no  less  successfully  appeal  to 
me,    even   though   it   involve   my   going   back   a 
little  to  place  three  or  four  of  these  latter,  written 
at  Geneva  in  1860.     Mrs.  William  Tappan,  pri 
marily  Caroline  Sturgis  of  Boston,  was  for  long 
years  and  to  the  end  of  her  life  our  very  great 
friend  and  one  of  my  father's  most  constant  and 
most  considered  interlocutors,  both  on  the  ground 
of  his   gravity   and   on   that   of   his   pleasantry. 
She  had  spent  in  Europe  with  her  husband  and 
her   two   small   daughters   very   much   the   same 
years,  from  early  in  the  summer  of  '55  till  late 
in  the  autumn  of  '60,  that  we  had  been  spending; 
and  like  ourselves,  though  with  less  continuity 
for  the  time,  she  had  come  to  live  at  Newport, 
where,  with  no  shadow  of  contention,  but  with 
an  admirable  intelligence,  of  the  incurably  ironic 
or   mocking   order,    she   was   such   a   light,    free, 
somewhat    intellectually    perverse    but    socially 
impulsive  presence  (always  for  instance  insatiably 
hospitable)  as  our  mustered  circle  could  ill  have 
spared.     If  play  of  mind,   which  she  carried  to 


213 


214     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

any  point  of  quietly-smiling  audacity  that  might 
be,  had  not  already  become  a  noted,  in  fact  I 
think  the  very  most  noted,  value  among  us,  it 
would  have  seated  itself  there  in  her  person  with 
a  nervous  animation,  a  refinement  of  what  might 
have  been  called  soundable  sincerity,  that  left 
mere  plump  assurance  in  such  directions  far  in 
the  lurch.  And  she  was  interesting,  she  became 
fairly  historic,  with  the  drawing-out  of  the  years, 
as  almost  the  only  survivor  of  that  young  band  of 
the  ardent  and  uplifted  who  had  rallied  in  the 
other  time  to  the  "transcendental"  standard, 
the  movement  for  organised  candour  of  conver 
sation  on  almost  all  conceivable  or  inconceiv 
able  things  which  appeared,  with  whatever  loose 
ness,  to  find  its  prime  inspirer  in  Emerson  and 
become  more  familiarly,  if  a  shade  less  authen 
tically,  vocal  in  Margaret  Fuller.  Hungry,  ever  so 
cheerfully  and  confidently  hungry,  had  been  much 
of  the  New  England,  and  peculiarly  the  Boston, 
of  those  days;  but  with  no  such  outreaching  of 
the  well-scoured  empty  platter,  it  probably  would 
have  struck  one,  as  by  the  occasional  and  quite 
individual  agitation  of  it  from  some  ruefully- 
observed  doorstep  of  the  best  society.  It  was 
from  such  a  doorstep  that  Caroline  Sturgis  had 
originally  taken  her  restless  flight,  just  as  it  was 
on  such  another  that,  after  a  course  of  infinite 
freedom  of  inquiry  and  irony,  she  in  the  later 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    215 

time,  with  a  fortune  inherited,  an  hospitality 
extended  and  a  genial  gravity  of  expression 
confirmed,  alighted  again,  to  the  no  small  re- 
enrichment  of  a  company  of  friends  who  had 
had  meanwhile  scarce  any  such  intellectual  ad 
ventures  as  she  was  to  retain,  in  a  delicate 
and  casual  irreverence,  the  just  slightly  sharp 
fragrance  or  fine  asperity  of,  but  who  might 
cultivate  with  complacency  and  in  support  of 
the  general  claim  to  comprehensive  culture  and 
awareness  unafraid  the  legend  of  her  vicarious 
exposure. 

Mr.  Frank  Sanborn's  school,  which  I  have 
already  mentioned  and  to  which  the  following 
alludes,  was  during  the  years  immediately  pre 
ceding  the  War,  as  during  those  of  the  War  itself, 
the  last  word  of  what  was  then  accounted  the 
undauntedly  modern,  flourishing  as  it  did  under 
the  patronage  of  the  most  "advanced"  thought. 
The  "coeducational"  idea  had  up  to  that  time, 
if  I  mistake  not,  taken  on  no  such  confident  and 
consistent,  certainly  no  such  graceful  or  plausible 
form;  small  boys  and  big  boys,  boys  from  near 
and  boys  from  far,  consorted  there  and  cohabited, 
so  far  as  community  of  board  and  lodging  and  of 
study  and  sport  went,  with  little  girls  and  great 
girls,  mainly  under  the  earnest  tutoring  and 
elder-sistering  of  young  women  accomplished  as 
scholarly  accomplishment  in  such  cases  was  then 


216    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

understood,  but  with  Mr.  Sanborn  himself  of 
course  predominantly  active  and  instructional, 
and  above  all  with  the  further  felicity  of  the 
participation  of  the  generous  Emerson  family  by 
sympathy  and  interest  and  the  protective  spread 
of  the  rich  mantle  of  their  presence.  The  case 
had  been  from  the  first  a  frank  and  high-toned 
experiment,  a  step  down  from  the  tonic  air,  as 
was  so  considerably  felt,  of  radical  conviction  to 
the  firm  ground  of  radical  application,  that  is 
of  happy  demonstration  —  an  admittedly  new  and 
trustful  thing,  but  all  the  brighter  and  wiser, 
all  the  more  nobly  and  beautifully  workable  for 
that.  With  but  the  scantest  direct  observation 
of  the  attempted  demonstration  —  demonstration, 
that  is,  of  the  excellent  fruit  such  a  grafting  might 
produce  —  I  yet  imagine  the  enacted  and  con 
siderably  prolonged  scene  (it  lasted  a  whole 
decade)  to  have  heaped  perfectly  full  the  measure 
of  what  it  proposed.  The  interesting,  the  curi 
ous,  the  characteristic  thing  was  just,  however,  I 
seem  to  make  out  —  I  seemed  to  have  made  out 
even  at  the  time  —  in  the  almost  complete  absence 
of  difficulty.  It  might  almost  then  be  said  of 
the  affair  that  it  hadn't  been  difficult  enough  for 
interest  even  should  one  insist  on  treating  it  as 
sufficiently  complicated  or  composed  for  picture. 
The  great  War  was  to  leave  so  many  things 
changed,  the  country  over,  so  many  elements 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    217 

added,  to  say  nothing  of  others  subtracted,  in 
the  American  consciousness  at  large,  that  even 
though  the  coeducational  idea,  taking  to  itself 
strength,  has  during  these  later  years  pushed 
its  conquests  to  the  very  verge  of  demonstration 
of  its  inevitable  limits,  my  memory  speaks  to  me 
of  the  Concord  school  rather  as  of  a  supreme 
artless  word  on  the  part  of  the  old  social  order 
than  as  a  charged  intimation  or  announcement 
on  the  part  of  the  new.  The  later  arrangements, 
more  or  less  in  its  likeness  and  when  on  a  con 
siderable  scale,  have  appeared,  to  attentive 
observation,  I  think,  mere  endlessly  multiplied 
notes  of  the  range  of  high  spirits  in  the  light  heart 
of  communities  more  aware  on  the  whole  of 
the  size  and  number  of  their  opportunity,  of  the 
boundless  spaces,  the  possible  undertakings,  the 
uncritical  minds  and  the  absent  standards  about 
them,  than  of  matters  to  be  closely  and  preparedly 
reckoned  with.  They  have  been,  comparatively 
speaking,  experiments  in  the  void  —  the  great  void 
that  may  spread  so  smilingly  between  wide 
natural  borders  before  complications  have  begun 
to  grow.  The  name  of  the  complication  before 
the  fact  is  very  apt  to  be  the  discovery  —  which 
latter  term  was  so  promptly  to  figure  for  the 
faith  that  living  and  working  more  intimately 
together  than  had  up  to  then  been  conceived 
possible  would  infinitely  improve  both  the  con- 


218     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

dition  and  the  performance  of  the  brother  and 
sister  sexes.  It  takes  long  in  new  communities 
for  discoveries  to  become  complications  —  though 
complications  become  discoveries  doubtless  often 
in  advance  of  this;  the  large  vague  area,  with 
its  vast  marginal  ease,  over  which  confidence 
could  run  riot  and  new  kinds  of  human  relation, 
elatedly  proposed,  flourish  in  the  sun,  was  to 
shift  to  different  ground  the  question  the  Concord 
school  had  played  with,  during  its  term  of  life,  on 
its  smaller  stage,  under  the  great  New  England 
elms  and  maples  and  in  the  preoccupied  New 
England  air. 

The  preoccupation  had  been  in  a  large  measure, 
it  is  true,  exactly  with  such  possibilities,  such 
bright  fresh  answers  to  old  stale  riddles,  as  Mr. 
Sanborn  and  his  friends  clubbed  together  to 
supply;  but  I  can  only,  for  my  argument,  recover 
the  sense  of  my  single  visit  to  the  scene,  which 
must  have  been  in  the  winter  of  '62-'63,  I  think, 
and  which  put  before  me,  as  I  seem  now  to  make 
out,  some  suggested  fit  of  perversity  —  not  desper 
ate,  quite  harmless  rather,  and  almost  frivolously 
futile,  on  the  part  of  a  particular  little  world  that 
had  been  thrown  back  upon  itself  for  very  bore 
dom  and,  after  a  spell  of  much  admired  talking 
and  other  beating  of  the  air,  wanted  for  a  change 
to  "do"  something.  The  question  it  "played" 
with  I  just  advisedly  said  —  for  what  could  my 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    219 

impression  have  been,  personally  if  indirectly 
gathered,  and  with  my  admirably  communicative 
younger  brother  to  testify,  but  that  if  as  a  school, 
in  strict  parlance,  the  thing  was  scarce  more  than 
naught,  as  a  prolonged  pastime  it  was  scarce  less 
than  charming  and  quite  filled  up  in  that  direc 
tion  its  ample  and  original  measure?  I  have  to 
reckon,  I  here  allow,  with  the  trick  of  what  I  used 
irrepressibly  to  read  into  things  in  front  of  which 
I  found  myself,  for  gaping  purposes,  planted  by 
some  unquestioned  outer  force:  it  seemed  so 
prescribed  to  me,  so  imposed  on  me,  to  read 
more,  as  through  some  ever-felt  claim  for  round 
ness  of  aspect  and  intensity  of  effect  in  presented 
matters,  whatever  they  might  be,  than  the 
conscience  of  the  particular  affair  itself  was 
perhaps  developed  enough  to  ask  of  it.  The 
experience  of  many  of  the  Concord  pupils  during 
the  freshness  of  the  experiment  must  have 
represented  for  them  a  free  and  yet  ever  so 
conveniently  conditioned  taste  of  the  idyllic  — 
such  possibilities  of  perfect  good  comradeship 
between  unsuspected  and  unalarmed  youths  and 
maidens  (on  a  comprehensive  ground  that  really 
exposed  the  business  to  a  light  and  put  it  to  a 
test)  as  they  were  never  again  to  see  so  favoured 
in  every  way  by  circumstance  and,  one  may 
quite  emphatically  say,  by  atmosphere.  It  is 
the  atmosphere  that  comes  back  to  me  as  most 


220    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

of  all  the  making  of  the  story,  even  when  inhaled 
but  by  an  occasional  whiff  and  from  afar  —  the 
manner  of  my  own  inhaling.  In  that  air  of 
charmed  and  cultivated  good  faith  nothing  for 
which  the  beautiful  might  be  so  presumingly 
claimed  —  if  only  claimed  with  a  sufficiently  brave 
clean  emphasis  —  wouldn't  have  worked,  which 
was  the  great  thing;  every  one  must  have  felt 
that  what  was  aspired  to  did  work,  and  as  I 
catch  the  many-voiced  report  of  it  again  (many- 
voiced  but  pretty  well  suffused  with  one  clear 
tone,  this  of  inflections  irreproducible  now)  I 
seem  to  listen  in  convinced  admiration,  though 
not  by  any  means  in  stirred  envy,  to  the  cheerful 
clatter  of  its  working.  My  failure  of  envy  has, 
however,  no  mite  of  historic  importance,  proving 
as  it  does  nothing  at  all  but  that  if  we  had,  in  the 
family  sense,  so  distinctly  turned  our  back  on 
Europe,  the  distinctness  was  at  no  point  so 
marked  as  in  our  facing  so  straight  to  such  a 
picture,  by  which  I  mean  to  such  an  exhibition, 
as  my  father's  letter  throws  off.  Without  knowl 
edge  of  the  letter  at  the  time  I  yet  measured  the 
situation  much  as  he  did  and  enjoyed  it  as  he  did, 
because  it  would  have  been  stupid  not  to;  but 
from  that  to  any  wishful  vision  of  being  in  it  or 
of  it  would  have  been  a  long  jump,  of  which  I 
was  unabashedly  incapable.  To  have  broken 
so  personally,  so  all  but  catastrophically,  with 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

Europe  as  we  had  done  affected  me  as  the  jump 
sufficient;  we  had  landed  somewhere  in  quite 
another  world  or  at  least  on  the  sharp  edge  of 
one;  and  in  the  single  particular  sense  could  I, 
as  time  then  went  on,  feel  myself  at  all  moved, 
with  the  helpless,  the  baffled  visionary  way  of 
it,  to  push  further  in.  What  straight  solicitation 
that  phase  of  the  American  scene  could  exert - 
more  coercive  to  the  imagination  than  any  we 
were  ever  again,  as  Americans,  to  know  —  I  shall 
presently  try  to  explain;  but  this  was  an  in 
tensely  different  matter. 

I  buried  two  of  my  children  yesterday  —  at  Con 
cord,  Mass.,  and  feel  so  heartbroken  this  morning  that 
I  shall  need  to  adopt  two  more  instantly  to  supply 
their  place;  and  lo  and  behold  you  and  William 
present  yourselves,  or  if  you  decline  the  honour  Ellen 
and  Baby.  Mary  and  I  trotted  forth  last  Wednes 
day,  bearing  Wilky  and  Bob  in  our  arms  to  surrender 
them  to  the  famous  Mr.  Sanborn.  The  yellowest 
sunshine  and  an  atmosphere  of  balm  were  all  over  the 
goodly  land,  while  the  maple,  the  oak  and  the  dog 
wood  showered  such  splendours  upon  the  eye  as 
made  the  Champs  Elysees  and  the  Bois  appear  par 
venus  and  comical.  Mrs.  Clark  is  a  graceless  enough 
woman  outwardly,  but  so  tenderly  feathered  inwardly, 
so  unaffectedly  kind  and  motherly  toward  the  urchins 
under  her  roof,  that  one  was  glad  to  leave  them  in 
that  provident  nest.  She  has  three  or  four  other 
school-boarders,  one  of  them  a  daughter  of  John  Brown 

-  tall,  erect,  long-haired  and  freckled,  as  John  Brown's 
daughter  has  a  right  to  be.  I  kissed  her  (inwardly) 


222    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

between  the  eyes,  and  inwardly  heard  the  martyred 
Johannes  chuckle  over  the  fat  inheritance  of  love  and 
tenderness  he  had  after  all  bequeathed  to  his  children 
in  all  good  men's  minds.  An  arch  little  Miss  Plumley 
also  lives  there,  with  eyes  full  of  laughter  and  a  mouth 
like  a  bed  of  lilies  bordered  with  roses.  How  it  is  going 
to  be  possible  for  my  two  boys  to  pursue  their  studies 
in  the  midst  of  that  bewilderment  I  don't  clearly  see. 
I  am  only  sure  of  one  thing,  which  is  that  if  I  had  had 
such  educational  advantages  as  that  in  my  youth  I 
should  probably  have  been  now  far  more  nearly  ripe 
for  this  world's  business.  We  asked  to  see  Miss  Water 
man,  one  of  the  teachers  quartered  in  the  house,  in 
order  to  say  to  her  how  much  we  should  thank  her  if 
she  would  occasionally  put  out  any  too  lively  spark  she 
might  see  fall  on  the  expectant  tinder  of  my  poor  boys' 
bosoms;  but  Miss  W.  herself  proved  of  so  siliceous  a 
quality  on  inspection  —  with  round  tender  eyes,  young, 
fair  and  womanly  —  that  I  saw  in  her  only  new  danger 
and  no  promise  of  safety.  My  present  conviction  is 
that  a  general  conflagration  is  inevitable,  ending  in  the 
total  combustion  of  all  that  I  hold  dear  on  that  spot. 
Yet  I  can't  but  felicitate  our  native  land  that  such 
magnificent  experiments  in  education  go  on  among  us. 
Then  we  drove  to  Emerson's  and  waded  up  to  our 
knees  through  a  harvest  of  apples  and  pears,  which, 
tired  of  their  mere  outward  or  carnal  growth,  had 
descended  to  the  loving  bosom  of  the  lawn,  there  or 
elsewhere  to  grow  inwardly  meet  for  their  heavenly 
rest  in  the  veins  of  Ellen  the  saintly  and  others;  until 
at  last  we  found  the  cordial  Pan  himself  in  the  midst 
of  his  household,  breezy  with  hospitality  and  blowing 
exhilarating  trumpets  of  welcome.  Age  has  just  the 
least  in  the  world  dimmed  the  lustre  we  once  knew,  but 
an  unmistakable  breath  of  the  morning  still  encircles 
him,  and  the  odour  of  primaeval  woods.  Pitchpine  is 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

not  more  pagan  than  lie  continues  to  be,  and  acorns  as 
little  confess  the  gardener's  skill.  Still  I  insist  that  he 
is  a  voluntary  Pan,  that  it  is  a  condition  of  mere  wil- 
fulness  and  insurrection  on  his  part,  contingent  upon  a 
mercilessly  sound  digestion  and  an  uncommon  imag 
inative  influx,  and  I  have  no  doubt  that  even  he,  as 
the  years  ripen,  will  at  last  admit  Nature  to  be  trib 
utary  and  not  supreme.  However  this  be,  we  con 
sumed  juicy  pears  to  the  diligent  music  of  Pan's  pipe, 
while  Ellen  and  Edith  softly  gathered  themselves  upon 
two  low  stools  in  the  chimney-corner,  saying  never  a 
word  nor  looking  a  look,  but  apparently  hemming 
their  handkerchiefs;  and  good  Mrs.  Stearns,  who  sat 
by  the  window  and  seemed  to  be  the  village  dress 
maker,  ever  and  anon  glanced  at  us  over  her  spectacles 
as  if  to  say  that  never  before  has  she  seen  this  wondrous 
Pan  so  glistening  with  dewdrops.  Then  and  upon  the 
waves  of  that  friendly  music  we  were  duly  wafted  to 
our  educational  Zion  and  carefully  made  over  our 
good  and  promising  and  affectionate  boys  to  the 
school-master's  keeping.  Out  into  the  field  beside  his 
house  Sanborn  incontinently  took  us  to  show  how  his 
girls  and  boys  perform  together  their  worship  of  Hy- 
geia.  It  was  a  glimpse  into  that  new  world  wherein 
dwelleth  righteousness  and  which  is  full  surely  fast 
coming  upon  our  children  and  our  children's  children; 
and  I  could  hardly  keep  myself,  as  I  saw  my  children's 
eyes  drink  in  the  mingled  work  and  play  of  the  in 
spiring  scene,  from  shouting  out  a  joyful  Nunc  Dimittis. 
The  short  of  the  story  is  that  we  left  them  and  rode 
home  robbed  of  our  plumage,  feeling  sore  and  ugly 
and  only  hoping  that  they  wouldn't  die,  any  of  these 
cold  winter  days,  before  the  parental  breast  could  get 
there  to  warm  them  back  to  life  or  cheer  them  on  to  a 
better. 

Mrs.  William  Hunt  has  just  come  in  to  tell  the  good 


224    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

news  of  your  near  advent  and  that  she  has  found  the 
exact  house  for  you;  instigated  to  that  activity  by 
one  of  your  angels,  of  the  Hooper  band,  with  whom 
she  has  been  in  correspondence.  I  don't  thank  angel 
Hooper  for  putting  angel  Hunt  upon  that  errand,  since 
I  should  like  to  have  had  the  merit  of  it  myself.  I 
suspect  the  rent  is  what  it  ought  to  be:  if  it's  not  I 
will  lay  by  something  every  week  for  you  toward  it, 
and  have  no  doubt  we  shall  stagger  through  the  cold 
weather. 

I  gather  from  the  above  the  very  flower  of 
my  father's  irrepressible  utterance  of  his  con 
stitutional  optimism,  that  optimism  fed  so  little 
by  any  sense  of  things  as  they  were  or  are,  but 
rich  in  its  vision  of  the  facility  with  which  they 
might  become  almost  at  any  moment  or  from 
one  day  to  the  other  totally  and  splendidly 
different.  A  less  vague  or  vain  idealist  couldn't, 
I  think,  have  been  encountered;  it  was  given 
him  to  catch  in  the  fact  at  almost  any  turn  right 
or  left  some  flagrant  assurance  or  promise  of  the 
state  of  man  transfigured.  The  Concord  school 
could  be  to  him  for  the  hour  —  there  were  hours 
and  hours  !  —  such  a  promise;  could  even  figure 
in  that  light,  to  his  amplifying  sympathy,  in  a 
degree  disproportionate  to  its  genial,  but  after 
all  limited,  after  all  not  so  intensely  "inflated," 
as  he  would  have  said,  sense  of  itself.  In  which 
light  it  is  that  I  recognise,  and  even  to  elation, 
how  little,  practically,  of  the  idea  of  the  Revolu- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    225 

tion  in  the  vulgar  or  violent  sense  was  involved 
in  his  seeing  so  many  things,  in  the  whole  social 
order  about  him,  and  in  the  interest  of  their 
being  more  or  less  immediately  altered,  as  lament 
ably,  and  yet  at  the  same  time  and  under  such  a 
coloured  light,  as  amusingly  and  illustratively, 
wrong  —  wrong,  that  is,  with  a  blundering  helpless 
human  salience  that  kept  criticism  humorous, 
kept  it,  so  to  speak,  sociable  and  almost  "sym 
pathetic"  even  when  readiest.  The  case  was 
really  of  his  rather  feeling  so  vast  a  Tightness  close 
at  hand  or  lurking  immediately  behind  actual 
arrangements  that  a  single  turn  of  the  inward 
wheel,  one  real  response  to  pressure  of  the 
spiritual  spring,  would  bridge  the  chasms, 
straighten  the  distortions,  rectify  the  relations 
and,  in  a  word,  redeem  and  vivify  the  whole 
mass  —  after  a  far  sounder,  yet,  one  seemed  to  see, 
also  far  subtler,  fashion  than  any  that  our  spas 
modic  annals  had  yet  shown  us.  It  was  of  course 
the  old  story  that  we  had  only  to  be  with  more 
intelligence  and  faith  —  an  immense  deal  more, 
certainly  —  in  order  to  work  off,  in  the  happiest 
manner,  the  many-sided  ugliness  of  life;  which 
was  a  process  that  might  go  on,  blessedly,  in  the 
quietest  of  all  quiet  ways.  That  wouldn't  be 
blood  and  fire  and  tears,  or  would  be  none  of 
these  things  stupidly  precipitated;  it  would 
simply  have  taken  place  by  enjoyed  communica- 


226    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

tion  and  contact,  enjoyed  concussion  or  convul 
sion  even  —  since  pangs  and  agitations,  the  very 
agitations  of  perception  itself,  are  of  the  highest 
privilege  of  the  soul  and  there  is  always,  thank 
goodness,  a  saving  sharpness  of  play  or  com 
plexity  of  consequence  in  the  intelligence  com 
pletely  alive.  The  meaning  of  which  remarks 
for  myself,  I  must  be  content  to  add,  is  that  the 
optimists  of  the  world,  the  constructive  idealists, 
as  one  has  mainly  known  them,  have  too  often 
struck  one  as  overlooking  more  of  the  aspects 
of  the  real  than  they  recognise;  whereas  our 
indefeasible  impression,  William's  and  mine,  of 
our  parent  was  that  he  by  his  very  constitution 
and  intimate  heritage  recognised  many  more  of 
those  than  he  overlooked.  What  was  the  finest 
part  of  our  intercourse  with  him  —  that  is  the 
most  nutritive  —  but  a  positive  record  of  that? 
Such  a  matter  as  that  the  factitious  had  absolutely 
no  hold  on  him  was  the  truest  thing  about  him, 
and  it  was  all  the  while  present  to  us,  I  think, 
as  backing  up  his  moral  authority  and  play  of 
vision  that  never,  for  instance,  had  there  been  a 
more  numerous  and  candid  exhibition  of  all  the 
human  susceptibilities  than  in  the  nest  of  his 
original  nurture.  I  have  spoken  of  the  fashion 
in  which  I  still  see  him,  after  the  years,  attentively 
bent  over  those  much  re-written  "papers,"  that 
we  had,  even  at  our  stupidest,  this  warrant  for 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    227 

going  in  vague  admiration  of  that  they  caught 
the  eye,  even  the  most  filially  detached,  with  a 
final  face  of  wrought  clarity,  and  thereby  of 
beauty,  that  there  could  be  no  thinking  un 
important  —  and  see  him  also  fall  back  from  the 
patient  posture,  again  and  again,  in  long  fits 
of  remoter  consideration,  wondering,  pondering 
sessions  into  which  I  think  I  was  more  often  than 
not  moved  to  read,  for  the  fine  interest  and 
colour  of  it,  some  story  of  acute  inward  difficulty 
amounting  for  the  time  to  discouragement.  If 
one  wanted  drama  there  was  drama,  and  of  the 
most  concrete  and  most  immediately  offered  to 
one's  view  and  one's  suspense;  to  the  point 
verily,  as  might  often  occur,  of  making  one  go 
roundabout  it  on  troubled  tiptoe  even  as  one 
would  have  held  one's  breath  at  the  play. 

These  opposed  glimpses,  I  say,  hang  before 
me  as  I  look  back,  but  really  fuse  together  in  the 
vivid  picture  of  the  fond  scribe  separated  but  by 
a  pane  of  glass  —  his  particular  preference  was 
always  directly  to  face  the  window  —  from  the 
general  human  condition  he  was  so  devoutly 
concerned  with.  He  saw  it,  through  the  near 
glass,  saw  it  in  such  detail  and  with  a  feeling  for 
it  that  broke  down  nowhere  —  that  was  the  great 
thing;  which  truth  it  confirmed  that  his  very 
fallings  back  and  long  waits  and  stays  and  almost 
stricken  musings  witnessed  exactly  to  his  in- 


228    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

tensity,  the  intensity  that  would  "come  out," 
after  all,  and  make  his  passionate  philosophy  and 
the  fullest  array  of  the  appearances  that  couldn't 
be  blinked  fit  together  and  harmonise.  Detached 
as  I  could  during  all  those  years  perhaps  queerly 
enough  believe  myself,  it  would  still  have  done 
my  young  mind  the  very  greatest  violence  to 
have  to  suppose  that  any  plane  of  conclusion  for 
him,  however  rich  and  harmonious  he  might 
tend  to  make  conclusion,  could  be  in  the  nature 
of  a  fool's  paradise.  Small  vague  outsider  as  I 
was,  I  couldn't  have  borne  that  possibility;  and 
I  see,  as  I  return  to  the  case,  how  little  I  really 
could  ever  have  feared  it.  This  would  have 
amounted  to  fearing  it  on  account  of  his  geniality 
—  a  shocking  supposition;  as  if  his  geniality  had 
been  thin  and  bete,  patched  up  and  poor,  and  not 
by  the  straightest  connections,  nominal  and  other, 
of  the  very  stuff  of  his  genius.  No,  I  feel  myself 
complacently  look  back  to  my  never  having,  even 
at  my  small  poorest,  been  so  bete,  either,  as  to 
conceive  he  might  be  "wrong,"  wrong  as  a 
thinker-out,  in  his  own  way,  of  the  great  myster 
ies,  because  of  the  interest  and  amusement  and 
vividness  his  attesting  spirit  could  fling  over  the 
immediate  ground.  What  he  saw  there  at  least 
could  be  so  enlightening,  so  evocatory,  could  fall 
in  so  —  which  was  to  the  most  inspiring  effect 
within  the  range  of  perception  of  a  scant  son  who 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

was  doubtless,  as  to  the  essential,  already  more 
than  anything  else  a  novelist  en  herbe.  If  it 
didn't  sound  in  a  manner  patronising  I  should 
say  that  I  saw  that  my  father  saw;  and  that  I 
couldn't  but  have  given  my  own  case  away  by 
not  believing,  however  obscurely,  in  the  virtue 
of  his  consequent  and  ultimate  synthesis.  Of 
course  I  never  dreamed  of  any  such  name  for  it  — 
I  only  thought  of  it  as  something  very  great  and 
fine  founded  on  those  forces  in  him  that  came 
home  to  us  and  that  touched  us  all  the  while. 
As  these  were  extraordinary  forces  of  sympathy 
and  generosity,  and  that  yet  knew  how  to  be 
such  without  falsifying  any  minutest  measure, 
the  structure  raised  upon  them  might  well,  it 
would  seem,  and  even  to  the  uppermost  sublime 
reaches,  be  as  valid  as  it  was  beautiful.  If  he 
so  endeared  himself  wasn't  it,  one  asked  as  time 
went  on,  through  his  never  having  sentimen 
talised  or  merely  meditated  away,  so  to  call  it,  the 
least  embarrassment  of  the  actual  about  him, 
and  having  with  a  passion  peculiarly  his  own 
kept  together  his  stream  of  thought,  however 
transcendent  and  the  stream  of  life,  however 
humanised?  There  was  a  kind  of  experiential 
authority  in  his  basis,  as  he  felt  his  basis  —  there 
being  no  human  predicament  he  couldn't  by  a 
sympathy  more  like  direct  experience  than  any 
I  have  known  enter  into;  and  this  authority, 


230     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

which  concluded  so  to  a  widening  and  brightening 
of  the  philosophic  —  for  him  the  spiritual  —  sky, 
made  his  character,  as  intercourse  disclosed  it, 
in  a  high  degree  fascinating.  These  things,  I 
think,  however,  are  so  happily  illustrated  in  his 
letters  that  they  look  out  from  almost  any 
continuous  passage  in  such  a  series  for  instance 
as  those  addressed  in  the  earlier  time  to  Mrs. 
Tappan.  ;His  tone,  that  is,  always  so  effectually 
looks  out,  and  the  living  parts  of  him  so  singularly 
hung  together,  that  one  may  fairly  say  his 
philosophy  was  his  tone.  To  cite  a  few  passages 
here  is  at  the  same  time  to  go  back  to  a  previous 
year  or  two  —  which  my  examples,  I  hold,  make 
worth  while.  He  had  been  on  a  visit  to  Paris 
toward  the  winter's  end  of  '60,  and  had  returned 
to  Geneva,  whence  he  writes  early  in  April. 

So  sleepy  have  I  been  ever  since  my  return  from 
Paris  that  I  am  utterly  unfit  to  write  letters.  I  was 
thoroughly  poisoned  by  tobacco  in  those  horrid  railway 
carriages,  and  this  with  want  of  sleep  knocked  me 
down.  I  am  only  half  awake  still,  and  will  not  en 
gage  consequently  in  any  of  those  profound  inquiries 
which  your  remembrance  always  suggests. 

I  am  very  sorry  for  you  that  you  live  in  an  excom 
municated  country,  or  next  door  to  it;  and  I  don't 
wonder  at  your  wanting  to  get  away.  But  it  is  pro 
voking  to  think  that  but  for  your  other  plan  Switzer 
land  might  possess  you  all  for  the  summer.  It  is 
doubtless  in  part  this  disappointment  that  will  un 
settle  us  in  our  present  moorings  and  take  us  probably 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    231 

soon  to  Germany.  What  after  that  I  have  no  idea, 
and  am  always  so  little  wilful  about  our  movements 
that  I  am  ready  the  young  ones  should  settle  them. 
So  we  may  be  in  Europe  a  good  while  yet,  always  pro 
viding  that  war  keep  smooth  his  wrinkled  front  and 
allow  us  quiet  newspapers.  They  must  fight  in  Italy 
for  some  time  to  come,  but  between  England  and 
France  is  the  main  point.  If  they  can  hold  aloof  from 
tearing  each  other  we  shall  manage;  otherwise  we  go 
home  at  once,  to  escape  the  universal  spatter  that 
must  then  ensue. 

What  is  the  meaning  of  all  these  wars  and  rumours 
of  wars?  No  respectable  person  ever  seems  to  occupy 
himself  with  the  question,  but  I  can't  help  feeling  it 
more  interesting  than  anything  in  Homer  or  Plato  or 
the  gallery  of  the  Vatican.  I  long  daily  with  unap 
peasable  longing  for  a  righteous  life,  such  a  life  as  I 
am  sure  is  implied  in  every  human  possibility,  and 
myriads  are  bearing  me  company.  What  does  this 
show  but  that  the  issue  is  near  out  of  all  our  existing 
chaos?  All  our  evil  is  fossil  and  comes  from  the  mere 
persistence  of  diseased  institutions  in  pretending  to 
rule  us  when  we  ought  to  be  left  free  to  be  living  spirits 
of  God.  There  is  no  fresh  evil  in  the  world.  No  one 
now  steals  or  commits  murder  or  any  other  offence 
with  the  least  relish  for  it,  but  only  to  revenge  his 
poor  starved  opportunities.  The  superiority  of  Amer 
ica  in  respect  to  freedom  of  thought  over  Europe  comes 
from  this  fact  that  she  has  so  nearly  achieved  her  de 
liverance  from  such  tyrannies.  All  she  now  needs  to 
make  her  right  is  simply  an  intelligent  recognition  of 
her  spiritual  whereabouts.  If  she  had  this  she  would 
put  her  hand  to  the  work  splendidly.  You  and  I 
when  we  get  home  will  try  to  quicken  her  intelligence 
in  that  respect,  will  do  at  any  rate  our  best  to  put 
away  this  pestilent  munching  of  the  tree  of  knowledge 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

of  good  and  evil,  and  persuade  to  the  belief  of  man's 
unmixed  innocence. 

Which,  it  will  easily  be  seen,  was  optimism 
with  a  vengeance,  and  marked  especially  in  the 
immediacy,  the  state  of  being  at  hand  for  him, 
of  a  social  redemption.  What  made  this  the 
more  signal  was  its  being  so  unattended  with 
visions  the  least  Apocalyptic  or  convulsional; 
the  better  order  slipping  in  amid  the  worse,  and 
superseding  it,  so  insidiously,  so  quietly  and,  by 
a  fair  measure,  so  easily.  It  was  a  faith  and  an 
accompanying  philosophy  that  couldn't  be  said 
not  to  be  together  simplifying;  and  yet  nothing 
was  more  unmistakable  when  we  saw  them  at 
close  range,  I  repeat,  than  that  they  weren't 
unnourished,  weren't  what  he  himself  would, 
as  I  hear  him,  have  called  the  "flatulent"  fruit 
of  sentimentality. 

His  correspondent  had  in  a  high  degree,  by  her 
vivacity  of  expression,  the  art  of  challenging  his  — 
as  is  markedly  apparent  from  a  letter  the  date 
of  which  fails  beyond  its  being  of  the  same  stay 
at  Geneva  and  of  the  winter's  end. 

If  I  had  really  imagined  that  I  had  bored  you  and 
your  husband  so  very  little  while  I  was  in  Paris  in 
December  I  should  long  since  have  repeated  the  ex 
periment;  the  more  surely  that  I  want  so  much  to 
see  again  my  darling  nieces  and  delight  myself  in  the 
abundance  of  their  large-eyed  belief.  .  .  .  Our  Alice 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    233 

is  still  under  discipline  —  preparing  to  fulfil  some  high 
destiny  or  other  in  the  future  by  reducing  decimal 
fractions  to  their  lowest  possible  rate  of  subsistence, 
where  they  often  grow  so  attenuated  under  her  rapid 
little  fingers  that  my  poor  old  eyes  can  no  longer  see 
them  at  all.  I  shall  go  before  long  to  England,  and 
then  perhaps — !  But  I  shan't  promise  anything  on 
her  behalf. 

You  ask  me  "why  I  do  not  brandish  my  tomahawk 
and,  like  Walt  Whitman,  raise  my  barbaric  yawp  over 
the  roofs  of  all  the  houses."  It  is  because  I  am  not 
yet  a  "cosmos"  as  that  gentleman  avowedly  is,  but 
only  a  very  dim  nebula,  doing  its  modest  best,  no 
doubt,  to  solidify  into  cosmical  dimensions,  but  still 
requiring  an  "awful  sight"  of  time  and  pains  and  pa 
tience  on  the  part  of  its  friends.  You  evidently  fancy 
that  cosmoses  are  born  to  all  the  faculty  they  shall 
ever  have,  like  ducks:  no  such  thing.  There  is  no  re 
spectable  cosmos  but  what  is  born  to  such  a  vapoury 
and  even  gaseous  inheritance  as  requires  long  cen 
turies  of  conflict  on  its  part  to  overcome  the  same  and 
become  pronounced  or  educated  in  its  proper  mineral, 
vegatable  or  animal  order.  Ducks  are  born  perfect; 
that  is  to  say  they  utter  the  same  unmodified  unim 
proved  quack  on  their  dying  pillow  that  they  uttered 
on  their  natal  day;  whereas  cosmoses  are  destined  to 
a  life  of  such  surprising  change  that  you  may  say  their 
career  is  an  incessant  disavowal  of  their  birth,  or  that 
their  highest  maturation  consists  in  their  utter  renun 
ciation  of  their  natural  father  and  mother.  You 
transcendentalists  make  the  fatal  mistake  of  denying 
education,  of  sundering  present  from  past  and  future 
from  present.  These  things  are  indissolubly  one,  the 
present  deriving  its  consciousness  only  from  the  past, 
and  the  future  drawing  all  its  distinctive  wisdom  from 
our  present  experience.  The  law  is  the  same  with 


234    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

the  individual  as  it  is  with  the  race:  none  of  us  can 
dodge  the  necessity  of  regeneration,  of  disavowing  our 
natural  ancestry  in  order  to  come  forth  in  our  own 
divinely-given  proportions.  The  secret  of  this  ne 
cessity  ought  to  reconcile  us  to  it,  however  onerous 
the  obligation  it  imposes;  for  that  secret  is  nothing 
more  nor  less  than  this,  that  we  cosmoses  have  a 
plenary  divine  origin  and  are  bound  eventually  to  see 
that  divinity  reproduced  in  our  most  familiar  and 
trivial  experience,  even  down  to  the  length  of  our  shoe- 
ties.  If  the  Deity  were  an  immense  Duck  capable 
only  of  emitting  an  eternal  quack  we  of  course  should 
all  have  been  born  webfooted,  each  as  infallible  in  his 
way  as  the  Pope,  nor  ever  have  been  at  the  expense 
and  bother  of  swimming-schools.  But  He  is  a  per 
fect  man,  incapable  of  the  slightest  quackery,  capable 
only  of  every  honest  and  modest  and  helpful  purpose, 
and  these  are  perfections  to  which  manifestly  no  one 
is  born,  but  only  re-born.  We  come  to  such  states 
not  by  learning,  only  by  unlearning.  No  natural 
edification  issues  in  spiritual  architecture  of  this  splen 
dour,  but  only  a  natural  demolition  or  undoing.  I 
dimly  recognise  this  great  truth,  and  hence  hold  more 
to  a  present  imbecility  than  to  a  too  eager  efficiency. 
I  feel  myself  more  fit  to  be  knocked  about  for  some  time 
yet  and  vastated  of  my  natural  vigour  than  to  com 
mence  cosmos  and  raise  the  barbaric  yawp.  Time 
enough  for  that  when  I  am  fairly  finished.  Say  what 
we  will,  you  and  I  are  all  the  while  at  school  just  now. 
The  genial  pedagogue  may  give  you  so  little  of  the  ferule 
as  to  leave  you  to  doubt  whether  you  really  are  there; 
but  this  only  proves  what  a  wonderful  pedagogue  it 
is,  and  how  capable  of  adapting  himself  to  everyone. 

His  friend  in  Paris  found  herself  at  that  time, 
like  many  other  persons,  much  interested  in  the 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    235 

exercise  of  automatic  writing,  of  which  we  have 
since  so  abundantly  heard  and  as  to  which  she 
had  communicated  some  striking  observations. 

.  .  .  Your  letter  is  full  of  details  that  interest  but 
don't  fascinate.  I  haven't  a  doubt  of  a  single  ex 
perience  you  allege,  and  do  not  agree  with  your  friend 
Count  S.  (your  writing  of  this  name  is  obscure)  that 
the  world  of  spirits  is  not  an  element  in  your  writing. 
I  am  persuaded  now  for  a  long  time  of  the  truth  of  these 
phenomena  and  feel  no  inclination  to  dispute  or  dis 
parage  them;  but  at  the  same  time  I  feel  to  such  a 
degree  my  own  remoteness  from  them  that  I  am  sure 
I  could  never  get  any  personal  contact  with  them. 
The  state  of  mind  exposing  one  to  influences  of  this 
nature,  and  which  makes  them  beneficial  to  it,  is  a 
sceptical  state;  and  this  I  have  never  known  for  a 
moment.  Spiritual  existence  has  always  been  more 
real  to  me  (I  was  going  to  say)  than  natural;  and  when 
accordingly  I  am  asked  to  believe  in  the  spiritual 
world  because  my  senses  are  getting  to  reveal  it  I 
feel  as  if  the  ground  of  my  conviction  were  going  to 
be  weakened  rather  than  strengthened.  Of  course  I 
should  have  very  little  respect  for  spiritual  things 
which  didn't  ultimately  report  themselves  to  sense, 
which  didn't  indeed  subside  into  things  of  sense  as 
logically  as  a  house  into  its  foundations.  But  what  I 
deny  is  that  spiritual  existence  can  be  directly  known 
on  earth  —  known  otherwise  than  by  correspondence 
or  inversely.  The  letter  of  every  revelation  must  be 
directly  hostiiv  to  its  spirit,  and  only  inversely  accord 
ant,  because  the  very  pretension  of  revelation  is 
that  it's  a  descent,  an  absolute  coming  down,  of  truth, 
a  humiliation  of  it  from  its  own  elevated  and  habitual 
plane  to  a  lower  one. 


236    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

Admit  therefore  that  the  facts  of  "spiritualism"  are 
all  true;  admit  that  persons  really  deceased  have  been 
communicating  with  you  about  the  state  of  Europe, 
the  approaching  crisis  and  the  persons  known  to  us 
whom  you  name;  in  that  case  I  should  insist  that,  to 
possess  the  slightest  spiritual  interest,  their  revela 
tion  should  be  re-translated  into  the  spiritual  tongue 
by  correspondences;  because  as  to  any  spirit  knowing 
or  caring  to  know  those  persons,  or  being  bothered 
about  any  crisis  of  ours,  that  is  to  me  simply  incredible. 
Such  matters  have  in  each  case  doubtless  some  spirit 
ual  or  substantial  counterpart  answering  in  every 
particular  to  its  superficial  features;  and  Wilkinson 
and  Emerson,  for  instance,  with  the  others,  are  of 
course  shadows  of  some  greater  or  less  spiritual  quan 
tities.  But  I'll  be  hanged  if  there's  the  slightest 
sensible  accord  between  the  substance  and  the  sem 
blance  on  either  hand.  Your  spirits,  no  doubt,  give 
you  the  very  communications  you  report  to  me;  only 
Wilkinson  spiritually  interpreted  and  Emerson  spirit 
ually  interpreted  mean  things  so  very  different 
from  our  two  friends  of  those  denominations  that  if 
our  spiritual  eye  were  for  a  moment  open  to  discern 
the  difference  I  think  it  highly  probable  —  I'm  sure 
it  is  infinitely  possible  —  we  should  renounce  their 
acquaintance. 

But  I  have  harped  on  this  string  long  enough;  let 
me  change  the  tune.  Your  spirits  tell  you  to  repose 
in  what  they  are  doing  for  you  and,  with  a  pathos  to 
which  I  am  not  insensible,  say  "Rest  now,  poor  child; 
your  struggles  have  been  great;  clasp  peace  to  your 
bosom  at  last."  And  as  a  general  thing  our  ears  are 
saluted  by  assurances  that  these  communications  are 
all  urged  by  philanthropy  and  that  everyone  so  ad 
dressing  us  wants  in  some  way  to  help  and  elevate 
us.  But  just  this  is  to  my  mind  the  unpleasant  side 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    237 

of  the  business.  I  have  been  so  long  accustomed  to 
see  the  most  arrant  deviltry  transact  itself  in  the  name 
of  benevolence  that  the  moment  I  hear  a  profession 
of  good-will  from  almost  any  quarter  I  instinctively 
look  about  for  a  constable  or  place  my  hand  within 
reach  of  the  bell-rope.  My  ideal  of  human  inter 
course  would  be  a  state  of  things  in  which  no  man 
will  ever  stand  in  need  of  any  other  man's  help,  but 
will  derive  all  his  satisfaction  from  the  great  social 
tides  which  own  no  individual  names.  I  am  sure  no 
man  can  be  put  in  a  position  of  dependence  upon 
another  without  that  other's  very  soon  becoming  —  if 
he  accepts  the  duties  of  the  relation  —  utterly  degraded 
out  of  his  just  human  proportions.  No  man  can  play 
the  Deity  to  his  fellow  man  with  impunity  —  I  mean 
spiritual  impunity  of  course.  For  see:  if  I  am  at  all 
satisfied  with  that  relation,  if  it  contents  me  to  be  in  a 
position  of  generosity  toward  others,  I  must  be  remark 
ably  indifferent  at  bottom  to  the  gross  social  inequal 
ity  which  permits  that  position,  and  instead  of  re 
senting  the  enforced  humiliation  of  my  fellow  man  to 
myself,  in  the  interests  of  humanity,  I  acquiesce  in 
it  for  the  sake  of  the  profit  it  yields  to  my  own  self- 
complacency.  I  do  hope  the  reign  of  benevolence  is 
over;  until  that  event  occurs  I  am  sure  the  reign  of 
God  will  be  impossible.  But  I  have  a  shocking  bad 
cold  that  racks  my  head  to  bursting  almost;  I  can't 
think  to  any  purpose.  Let  me  hear  soon  from  you 
that  I  have  not  been  misunderstood.  I  wouldn't  for 
the  world  seem  wilfully  to  depreciate  what  you  set  a 
high  value  on.  No,  I  really  can't  help  my  judgments. 
And  I  always  soften  them  to  within  an  inch  of  their 
life  as  it  is. 

The   following,   no   longer  from   the   Hotel   de 
PEcu,  but  from  5  Quai  du  Mont  Blanc,  would 


238    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

indicate  that  his  "Dear  Queen  Caroline/'  as  he 
addresses  her,  was  at  no  loss  to  defend  her  own 
view  of  the  matters  in  discussion  between  them: 
in  which  warm  light  indeed  it  is  that  I  was  myself 
in  the  after  years  ever  most  amusedly  to  see  her. 

Don't  scold  a  fellow  so!  Exert  your  royal  gifts  in 
exalting  only  the  lowly  and  humbling  only  the  proud. 
Precisely  what  I  like,  to  get  extricated  from  meta 
physics,  is  encouragement  from  a  few  persons  like 
yourself,  such  encouragement  as  would  lie  in  your  in 
telligent  apprehension  and  acknowledgment  of  the 
great  result  of  metaphysics,  which  is  a  godly  and  spot 
less  life  on  earth.  If  I  could  find  anyone  apt  to  that 
doctrine  I  should  not  work  so  hard  metaphysically  to 
convince  the  world  of  its  truth.  And  as  for  being  a 
metaphysical  Jack  Horner,  the  thing  is  contradictory, 
as  no  metaphysician  whose  studies  are  sincere  ever 
felt  tempted  to  self-complacency  or  disposed  to  reckon 
himself  a  good  boy.  Such  exaltations  are  not  for 
him,  but  only  for  the  artists  and  poets,  who  dazzle  the 
eyes  of  mankind  and  don't  recoil  from  the  darkness  they 
themselves  produce  —  as  Dryden  says,  or  Collins. 

Mrs.  Tappan,  spending  the  month  of  June  in 
London,  continued  to  impute  for  the  time,  I 
infer  (I  seem  to  remember  a  later  complete  de 
tachment),  a  livelier  importance  to  the  super 
natural  authors  of  her  "writing"  than  her 
correspondent  was  disposed  to  admit;  but  almost 
anything  was  a  quickener  of  the  correspondent's 
own  rich,  that  is  always  so  animated,  earnestness. 
He  had  to  feel  an  interlocutor's  general  sympathy, 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    239 

or  recognise  a  moral  relation,  even  if  a  disturbed 
one,  for  the  deep  tide  of  his  conviction  to  rise 
outwardly  higher;  but  when  that  happened  the 
tide  overflowed  indeed. 

MY  DEAR  CAROLINA  —  Neither  North  nor  South, 
but  an  eminently  free  State,  with  no  exulting  shout  of 
master  and  no  groan  of  captive  to  be  heard  in  all  its 
borders,  but  only  the  cheerful  hum  of  happy  husband 
and  children  —  how  do  you  find  London?  Here  in 
Geneva  we  are  so  saturate  with  sunshine  that  we 
would  fain  dive  to  the  depths  of  the  lake  to  learn 
coolness  of  the  little  fishes.  Still,  we  don't  envy  your 
two  weeks  of  unbroken  rain  in  dear  dismal  London. 
What  a  preparation  for  doing  justice  to  Lenox!  You 
see  I  know  —  through  Mary  Tweedy,  who  has  a 
hearty  appreciation  of  her  London  privileges.  How 
are  A.  D.  and  all  the  rest  of  them?  Familiar  spirits, 
are  they  not,  on  a  short  acquaintance?  —  and  how 
pleasant  an  aspect  it  gives  to  the  middle  kingdom  to 
think  you  shall  be  sure  to  find  there  such  lovers  and 
friends!  Only  let  us  keep  them  at  a  proper  distance. 
It  doesn't  do  for  us  ever  to  accept  another  only  at  that 
other's  own  estimate  of  himself.  If  we  do  we  may  as 
well  plunge  into  Tartarus  at  once.  No  human  being 
can  afford  to  commit  his  happiness  to  another's  keep 
ing,  or,  what  is  the  same  thing,  forego  his  own  in 
dividuality  with  all  that  it  imports.  The  first  req 
uisite  of  our  true  relationship  to  each  other  (spirit 
ually  speaking)  is  that  we  be  wholly  independent  of 
each  other:  then  we  may  give  ourselves  away  as  much 
as  we  please,  we  shall  do  neither  them  nor  ourselves 
any  harm.  But  until  that  blessed  day  comes,  by  the 
advance  of  a  scientific  society  among  men,  we  shall 
be  utterly  unworthy  to  love  each  other  or  be  loved  in 


240    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

return.     We   shall   do   nothing   but   prey   upon   each 
other  and  turn  each  other's  life  to  perfect  weariness. 

The  more  of  it  then  just  now  the  better!  The  more 
we  bite  and  devour  each  other,  the  more  horribly  the 
newspapers  abound  in  all  the  evidences  of  our  disgust 
ing  disorganisation,  the  disorganisation  of  the  old 
world,  the  readier  will  our  dull  ears  be  to  listen  to  the 
tidings  of  the  new  world  which  is  aching  to  appear, 
the  world  wherein  dwelleth  righteousness.  Don't 
abuse  the  newspapers  therefore  publicly,  but  tell 
everybody  of  the  use  they  are  destined  to  promote, 
and  set  others  upon  the  look-out.  A.  D.  is  a  very  good 
woman,  I  haven't  a  doubt,  but  will  fast  grow  a  better 
one  if  she  would  let  herself  alone,  and  me  also,  and  all 
other  mere  persons,  while  she  diligently  inquires  about 
the  Lord;  that  is  about  that  lustrous  universal  life 
which  God's  providence  is  now  forcing  upon  men's 
attention  and  which  will  obliterate  for  ever  all  this 
exaggeration  of  our  personalities.  It  is  very  well  for 
lovers  to  abase  themselves  in  this  way  to  each  other; 
because  love  is  a  passion  of  one's  nature  —  that  is  to 
say  the  lover  is  not  self-possessed,  but  is  lifted  for  a 
passing  moment  to  the  level  of  the  Lord's  life  in  the 
race,  and  so  attuned  to  higher  issues  ever  after  in  his 
own  proper  sphere.  But  these  experiences  are  purely 
disciplinary  and  not  final.  All  passion  is  a  mere  in 
ducement  to  action,  and  when  at  last  activity  really 
dawns  in  us  we  drop  this  faculty  of  hallucination  that 
we  have  been  under  about  persons  and  see  and  adore 
the  abounding  divinity  which  is  in  all  persons  alike. 
Who  will  then  ever  be  caught  in  that  foolish  snare 
again?  I  did  nothing  but  tumble  into  it  from  my  boy 
hood  up  to  my  marriage;  since  which  great  disil 
lusioning  —  yes !  —  I  feel  that  the  only  lovable  per 
son  is  one  who  will  never  permit  himself  to  be  loved. 
But  I  have  written  on  without  any  intention  and  have 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    241 

now  no  time  to  say  what  alone  I  intended,  how  charm 
ing  and  kind  and  long  to  be  remembered  you  were  all 
those  Paris  days.  Give  my  love  to  honest  William 
and  tell  my  small  nieces  that  I  pine  to  pluck  again  the 
polished  cherries  of  their  cheeks.  My  wife  admires 
and  loves  you. 

From  which  I  jump  considerably  forward,  for 
its  (privately)  historic  value,  to  a  communication 
from  Newport  of  the  middle  of  August  '63.  My 
father's  two  younger  sons  had,  one  the  previous 
and  one  at  the  beginning  of  the  current,  year 
obtained  commissions  in  the  Volunteer  Army; 
as  a  sequel  to  which  my  next  younger  brother, 
as  Adjutant  of  the  Fifty -fourth  Massachusetts, 
Colonel  Robert  Shaw's  regiment,  the  first  body 
of  coloured  soldiers  raised  in  the  North,  had 
received  two  grave  wounds  in  that  unsuccessful 
attack  on  Fort  Wagner  from  which  the  gallant 
young  leader  of  the  movement  was  not  to  return. 

Wilky  had  a  bad  day  yesterday  and  kept  me  busy 
or  I  shouldn't  have  delayed  answering  your  inquiries 
till  to-day.  He  is  very  severely  wounded  both  in  the 
ankle  and  in  the  side  —  where  he  doesn't  heal  so  fast 
as  the  doctor  wishes  in  consequence  of  the  shell  having 
made  a  pouch  which  collects  matter  and  retards  nature. 
They  cut  it  open  yesterday,  and  to-day  he  is  better,  or 
will  be.  The  wound  in  the  ankle  was  made  by  a  can- 
nister  ball  an  inch  and  a  half  in  diameter,  which  lodged 
eight  days  in  the  foot  and  was  finally  dislodged  by 
cutting  down  through  (the  foot)  and  taking  it  out  at  the 
sole.  He  is  excessively  weak,  unable  to  do  anything 


242    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

but  lie  passive,  even  to  turn  himself  on  his  pillow.  He 
will  probably  have  a  slow  and  tedious  recovery  —  the 
doctors  say  of  a  year  at  least;  but  he  knows  nothing 
of  this  himself  and  speaks,  so  far  as  he  does  talk,  but 
of  going  back  in  the  Fall.  If  you  write  please  say 
nothing  of  this;  he  is  so  distressed  at  the  thought  of 
a  long  sickness.  He  is  vastly  attached  to  the  negro- 
soldier  cause;  believes  (I  think)  that  the  world  has 
existed  for  it;  and  is  sure  that  enormous  results  to 
civilisation  are  coming  out  of  it.  We  heard  from  Bob 
this  morning  at  Morris  Island;  with  his  regiment, 
building  earthworks  and  mounting  guns.  Hot,  he 
says,  but  breezy;  also  that  the  shells  make  for  them 
every  few  minutes  —  while  he  and  his  men  betake 
themselves  to  the  trenches  and  holes  in  the  earth 
"like  so  many  land-crabs  in  distress."  He  writes  in 
the  highest  spirits.  Cabot  Russell,  Wilky's  dearest 
friend,  is,  we  fear,  a  prisoner  and  wounded.  We  hear 
nothing  decisive,  but  the  indications  point  that  way. 
Poor  Wilky  cries  aloud  for  his  friends  gone  arid  miss 
ing,  and  I  could  hardly  have  supposed  he  might  be 
educated  so  suddenly  up  to  serious  manhood  alto 
gether  as  he  appears  to  have  been.  I  hear  from  Frank 
Shaw  this  morning,  and  they  are  all  well  —  and  ad 
mirable. 

This  goes  beyond  the  moment  I  had  lately, 
and  doubtless  too  lingeringly,  reached,  as  I  say; 
just  as  I  shall  here  find  convenience  in  borrowing 
a  few  passages  from  my  small  handful  of  letters 
of  the  time  to  follow  -  -  to  the  extent  of  its  not 
following  by  a  very  long  stretch.  Such  a  course 
keeps  these  fragments  of  record  together,  as 
scattering  them  would  perhaps  conduce  to  some 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    243 

leakage  in  their  characteristic  tone,  for  which  I 
desire  all  the  fulness  it  can  keep.  Impossible 
moreover  not  in  some  degree  to  yield  on  the  spot 
to  any  brush  of  the  huge  procession  of  those 
particular  months  and  years,  even  though  I  shall 
presently  take  occasion  to  speak  as  I  may  of  my 
own  so  inevitably  contracted  consciousness  of 
what  the  brush,  with  its  tremendous  possibilities 
of  violence,  could  consist  of  in  the  given  case.  I 
had,  under  stress,  to  content  myself  with  knowing 
it  in  a  more  indirect  and  muffled  fashion  than 
might  easily  have  been  —  even  should  one  speak 
of  it  but  as  a  matter  of  mere  vision  of  the  eyes 
or  quickened  wonder  of  the  mind  or  heaviness  of 
the  heart,  as  a  matter  in  fine  of  the  closer  and 
more  inquiring,  to  say  nothing  of  the  more 
agitated,  approach.  All  of  which,  none  the  less, 
was  not  to  prevent  the  whole  quite  indescribably 
intensified  time  —  intensified  through  all  lapses 
of  occasion  and  frustrations  of  contact  —  from 
remaining  with  me  as  a  more  constituted  and 
sustained  act  of  living,  in  proportion  to  my 
powers  and  opportunities,  than  any  other  homo 
geneous  stretch  of  experience  that  my  memory 
now  recovers.  The  case  had  to  be  in  a  peculiar 
degree,  alas,  that  of  living  inwardly  —  like  so 
many  of  my  other  cases;  in  a  peculiar  degree 
compared,  that  is,  to  the  immense  and  prolonged 
outwardness,  outwardness  naturally  at  the  very 


244    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

highest  pitch,  that  was  the  general  sign  of  the 
situation.  To  which  I  may  add  that  my  "alas" 
just  uttered  is  in  the  key  altogether  of  my  then 
current  consciousness,  and  not  in  the  least  in  that 
of  my  present  appreciation  of  the  same  —  so  that 
I  leave  it,  even  while  I  thus  put  my  mark  against 
it,  as  I  should  restore  tenderly  to  the  shelf  any 
odd  rococo  object  that  might  have  slipped  from 
a  reliquary.  My  appreciation  of  what  I  presume 
at  the  risk  of  any  apparent  fatuity  to  call  my 
"relation  to"  the  War  is  at  present  a  thing 
exquisite  to  me,  a  thing  of  the  last  refinement  of 
romance,  whereas  it  had  to  be  at  the  time  a  sore 
and  troubled,  a  mixed  and  oppressive  thing  — 
though  I  promptly  see,  on  reflection,  how  it  must 
frequently  have  flushed  with  emotions,  with 
small  scraps  of  direct  perception  even,  with 
particular  sharpnesses  in  the  generalised  pang 
of  participation,  that  were  all  but  touched  in 
themselves  as  with  the  full  experience.  Clear  as 
some  object  presented  in  high  relief  against  the 
evening  sky  of  the  west,  at  all  events,  is  the 
presence  for  me  beside  the  stretcher  on  which  my 
young  brother  was  to  lie  for  so  many  days  before 
he  could  be  moved,  and  on  which  he  had  lain 
during  his  boat-journey  from  the  South  to  New 
York  and  thence  again  to  Newport,  of  lost  Cabot 
Russell's  stricken  father,  who,  failing,  up  and 
down  the  searched  field,  in  respect  of  his  own 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    245 

irrecoverable  boy  -  -  then  dying,  or  dead,  as  after 
wards  appeared,  well  within  the  enemy's  works  - 
had  with  an  admirable  charity  brought  Wilky 
back  to  a  waiting  home  instead,  and  merged  the 
parental  ache  in  the  next  nearest  devotion  he 
could  find.  Vivid  to  me  still  is  one's  almost 
ashamed  sense  of  this  at  the  hurried  disordered 
time,  and  of  how  it  was  impossible  not  to  impute 
to  his  grave  steady  gentleness  and  judgment  a 
full  awareness  of  the  difference  it  would  have 
made  for  him,  all  the  same,  to  be  doing  such 
things  with  a  still  more  intimate  pity.  TJn- 
obliterated  for  me,  in  spite  of  vaguenesses,  this 
quasi-twilight  vision  of  the  good  bereft  man, 
bereft,  if  I  rightly  recall,  of  his  only  son,  as  he 
sat  erect  and  dry-eyed  at  the  guarded  feast  of 
our  relief;  and  so  much  doubtless  partly  because 
of  the  image  that  hovers  to  me  across  the  years 
of  Cabot  Russell  himself,  my  brother's  so  close 
comrade  —  dark-eyed,  youthfully  brown,  heartily 
bright,  actively  handsome,  and  with  the  arrested 
expression,  the  indefinable  shining  stigma,  worn, 
to  the  regard  that  travels  back  to  them,  by  those 
of  the  young  figures  of  the  fallen  that  memory 
and  fancy,  wanting,  never  ceasing  to  want,  to 
"do"  something  for  them,  set  as  upright  and 
clear-faced  as  may  be,  each  in  his  sacred  niche. 
They  have  each  to  such  a  degree,  so  ranged,  the 
strange  property  or  privilege  —  one  scarce  knows 


246    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

what  to  call  it  —  of  exquisitely,  for  all  our  time, 
facing  us  out,  quite  blandly  ignoring  us,  looking 
through  us  or  straight  over  us  at  something  they 
partake  of  together  but  that  we  mayn't  pretend 
to  know.  We  walk  thus,  I  think,  rather  ruefully 
before  them --those  of  us  at  least  who  didn't  at 
the  time  share  more  happily  their  risk.  William, 
during  those  first  critical  days,  while  the  stretcher 
itself,  set  down  with  its  load  just  within  the 
entrance  to  our  house,  mightn't  be  moved  further, 
preserved  our  poor  lacerated  brother's  aspect  in 
a  drawing  of  great  and  tender  truth  which  I 
permit  myself  to  reproduce.  It  tells  for  me  the 
double  story  —  I  mean  both  of  Wilky's  then 
condition  and  of  the  draughtsman's  admirable 
hand. 

But  I  find  waiting  my  father's  last  letter  of  the 
small  group  to  Mrs.  Tappan.  We  were  by  that 
time,  the  autumn  of  1865,  settled  in  Boston  for 
a  couple  of  years. 

MY  DEAR  CARRY  —  Are  you  a  carry atid  that  you 
consider  yourself  bound  to  uphold  that  Lenox  edifice 
through  the  cold  winter  as  well  as  the  hot  summer? 
Why  don't  you  come  to  town?  I  can't  write  what  I 
want  to  say.  My  brain  is  tired,  and  I  gladly  forego 
all  writing  that  costs  thought  or  attention.  But  I 
have  no  day  forgotten  your  question,  and  am  eager 
always  to  make  a  conquest  of  you;  you  are  so  full 
both  of  the  upper  and  the  nether  might  as  always 
greatly  to  excite  my  interest  and  make  me  feel  how 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    247 

little  is  accomplished  while  you  are  left  not  so.  I 
make  no  prayer  to  you;  I  would  have  no  assistance 
from  your  own  vows;  or  the  pleasure  of  my  inter 
course  with  you  would  be  slain.  I  would  rather  out 
rage  than  conciliate  your  sympathies,  that  I  might 
have  all  the  joy  of  winning  you  over  at  last.  Hate  me 
on  my  ideal  side,  the  side  that  menaces  you,  as  much 
as  you  please  meanwhile,  but  keep  a  warm  corner  in 
your  regard  for  me  personally,  as  I  always  do  for  you, 
until  we  meet  again.  It's  a  delight  to  know  a  person 
of  your  sense  and  depth;  even  the  gaudia  certaminis 
are  more  cheering  with  you  than  ordinary  agreements 
with  other  people. 

On  which  note  I  may  leave. the  exchange  in 
question,  feeling  how  equal  an  honour  it  does 
to  the  parties. 


VIII 

I  JUDGE  best  to  place  together  here  several 
passages  from  my  father's  letters  belonging 
to  this  general  period,  even  though  they  again 
carry  me  to  points  beyond  my  story  proper.  It 
is  not  for  the  story's  sake  that  I  am  moved  to 
gather  them,  but  for  their  happy  illustration, 
once  more,  of  something  quite  else,  the  human 
beauty  of  the  writer's  spirit  and  the  fine  breadth 
of  his  expression.  This  latter  virtue  is  most 
striking,  doubtless,  when  he  addresses  his  women 
correspondents,  of  whom  there  were  many,  yet 
it  so  pervades  for  instance  various  notes,  longer 
and  shorter,  to  Mrs.  James  T.  Fields,  wife  of 
the  eminent  Boston  publisher  and  editor,  much 
commended  to  us  as  founder  and,  for  a  time, 
chief  conductor  of  the  Atlantic  Monthly,  our  most 
adopted  and  enjoyed  native  recueil  of  that  series 
of  years.  The  Atlantic  seemed  somehow,  while 
the  good  season  lasted,  to  live  with  us,  whereas 
our  relation  to  the  two  or  three  other  like  organs, 
homegrown  or  foreign,  of  which  there  could  be 
any  question,  and  most  of  all,  naturally,  to  the 
great  French  Revue,  was  that  we  lived  with  them. 
The  light  of  literature,  as  we  then  invoked  or  at 
any  rate  received  it,  seemed  to  beat  into  the 

248 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    249 

delightful  Fields  salon  from  a  nearer  heaven  than 
upon  any  other  scene,  and  played  there  over  a 
museum  of  relics  and  treasures  and  apparitions 
(these  last  whether  reflected  and  by  that  time 
legendary,  or  directly  protrusive  and  presented, 
wearers  of  the  bay)  writh  an  intensity,  I  feel  again 
as  I  look  back,  every  resting  ray  of  which  was  a 
challenge  to  dreaming  ambition.  I  am  bound 
to  note,  none  the  less,  oddly  enough,  that  my 
father's  communications  with  the  charming  mis 
tress  of  the  scene  are  more  often  than  not  a  bright 
profession  of  sad  reasons  for  inability  to  mingle 
in  it.  He  mingled  with  reluctance  in  scenes 
designed  and  preappointed,  and  was,  I  think, 
mostly  content  to  feel  almost  anything  near  at 
hand  become  a  scene  for  him  from  the  moment 
he  had  happened  to  cast  into  the  arena  (which 
he  preferred  without  flags  or  festoons)  the  golden 
apple  of  the  unexpected  —  in  humorous  talk,  that 
is,  in  reaction  without  preparation,  in  sincerity 
which  was  itself  sociability.  It  was  not  neverthe 
less  that  he  didn't  now  and  then  "accept"  — 
with  attenuations. 


...  If  therefore  you  will  let  Alice  and  me  come 
to  you  on  Wednesday  evening  I  shall  still  rejoice  in  the 
benignant  fate  that  befalls  my  house  —  even  though 
my  wife,  indisposed,  "feels  reluctantly  constrained  to 
count  herself  out  of  the  sphere  of  your  hospitality;" 
and  I  will  bind  myself  moreover  by  solemn  vows  not 


250    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

to  perplex  the  happy  atmosphere  which  almost  reigns 
in  yours  by  risking  a  syllable  of  the  incongruous 
polemic  your  husband  wots  of.  I  will  listen  devotedly 
to  you  and  him  all  the  evening  if  thereby  I  may  early 
go  home  repaired  in  my  own  esteem,  and  not  dilapi 
dated,  as  has  been  hitherto  too  often  the  case. 

He  could  resist  persuasion  even  in  the  insidious 
form  of  an  expressed  desire  that  he  should  read 
something,  "something  he  was  writing,"  to  a 
chosen  company. 

Your  charming  note  is  irresistible  at  first  sight,  and 
I  had  almost  uttered  a  profligate  Yes !  —  that  is  a 
promise  irrespective  of  a  power  to  perform;  when  my 
good  angel  arrested  me  by  the  stern  inquiry:  What 
have  you  got  to  give  them?  And  I  could  only  say  in 
reply  to  this  intermeddling  but  blest  spirit:  Nothing, 
my  dear  friend,  absolutely  nothing!  Whereupon  the 
veracious  one  said  again:  Sit  you  down  immediately 
therefore  and,  confessing  your  literary  indigence  to 
this  lovely  lady,  pray  her  to  postpone  the  fulfilment 
of  her  desire  to  some  future  flood-tide  in  the  little 
stream  of  your  inspiration,  when  you  will  be  ready  to 
serve  her. 

The  following  refers  to  the  question  of  his 
attending  with  my  mother  at  some  session  of  a 
Social  Club,  at  which  a  prepared  performance 
of  some  sort  was  always  offered,  but  of  which 
they  had  lately  found  it  convenient  to  cease  to 
be  members. 

I  snatch  the  pen  from  my  wife's  hand  to  enjoy, 
myself,  the  satisfaction  of  saying  to  you  how  good  and 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    <?51 

kind  and  charming  you  always  are,  and  how  we  never 
grow  tired  of  recounting  the  fact  among  ourselves  here, 
and  yet  how  we  still  shall  be  unable  to  accept  your 
hospitality.  Why?  Simply  because  we  have  a  due 
sense  of  what  becomes  us  after  our  late  secession,  and 
would  not  willingly  be  seen  at  two  successive  meetings, 
lest  the  carnal  observer  should  argue  that  we  had  left 
the  Club  by  the  front  door  of  obligation  only  to  be 
readmitted  at  the  back  door  of  indulgence:  I  put  it 
as  Fields  would  phrase  it.  To  speak  of  him  always  re 
minds  me  of  various  things,  so  richly  endowed  is  the 
creature  in  all  good  gifts;  but  the  dominant  considera 
tion  evoked  in  my  mind  by  his  name  is  just  his  beauti 
ful  home  and  that  atmosphere  of  faultless  womanly 
worth  and  dignity  which  fills  it  with  light  and  warmth, 
and  makes  it  a  blessing  to  one's  heart  whenever  one 
enters  its  precincts.  Please  felicitate  the  wretch  for 
me  — ! 

However  earnest  these  deprecations  he  could 
embroider  them  with  a  rare  grace. 

My  wife  —  who  has  just  received  your  kind  note  in 
rapid  route  for  the  Dedham  Profane  Asylum,  or  some 
thing  of  that  sort  —  begs  leave  to  say,  through  me  as 
a  willing  and  sensitive  medium,  that  you  are  one  of 
those  arva  beata,  renowned  in  poetry,  which,  visit  them 
never  so  often,  one  is  always  glad  to  revisit,  which  are 
attractive  in  all  seasons  by  their  own  absolute  light 
and  without  any  Emersonian  pansies  and  buttercups 
to  make  them  so.  This  enthusiastic  Dedhamite  says 
further  in  effect  that  while  she  is  duly  grateful  for  your 
courteous  offer  of  a  seat  upon  your  sofa  to  hear  the 
conquered  sage,  she  yet  prefers  the  material  banquet 
you  summon  us  to  in  your  dining-room,  since  there 
we  should  be  out  of  the  mist  and  able  to  discern  be- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

tween  nature  and  cookery,  between  what  eats  and  what 
is  eaten,  at  all  events,  and  feel  a  thankful  mind  that 
we  were  in  solid  comfortable  Charles  Street,  instead 
of  in  the  vague  and  wide  weltering  galaxy,  and  should 
be  sure  to  deem  A.  and  J.  (7  am  sure  of  A.,  and  I 
think  my  wife  feels  equally  sure  of  J.),  finer  fireflies 
than  ever  sparkled  in  the  old  empyrean.  But  alas 
who  shall  control  his  destiny?  Not  my  wife,  whom 
multitudinous  cares  enthrall;  nor  yet  myself,  whom  a 
couple  of  months'  enforced  idleness  now  constrains 
to  a  preternatural  activity,  lest  the  world  fail  of  sal 
vation.  Please  accept  then  our  united  apologies  and 
regrets.  .  .  . 

P.S.  Who  contrived  the  comical  title  for  E.'s  lec 
tures? —  "Philosophy  of  the  People!"  May  it  not 
have  been  a  joke  of  J.  T.  F.'s?  It  would  be  no  less 
absurd  for  Emerson  himself  to  think  of  philosophising 
than  for  the  rose  to  think  of  botanising.  He  is  the 
divinely  pompous  rose  of  the  philosophic  garden, 
gorgeous  with  colour  and  fragrance;  so  what  a  sad 
look-out  for  tulip  and  violet  and  lily,  and  the  humbler 
grasses,  if  the  rose  should  turn  out  philosophic  gardener 
as  well. 

There  connects  itself  with  a  passage  in  another 
letter  to  the  same  correspondent  a  memory  of  my 
own  that  I  have  always  superlatively  cherished 
and  that  remains  in  consequence  vivid  enough 
for  some  light  reflection  here.  But  I  first  give 
the  passage,  which  is  of  date  of  November  '67. 
"What  a  charming  impression  of  Dickens  the 
other  night  at  the  Nortons'  dinner!  How  inno 
cent  and  honest  and  sweet  he  is  maugre  his  fame! 
Fields  was  merely  superb  on  the  occasion,  but 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    253 

Dickens  was  saintly."  As  a  young  person  of 
twenty-four  I  took  part,  restrictedly  yet  exaltedly, 
in  that  occasion  —  and  an  immense  privilege  I 
held  it  to  slip  in  at  all  —  from  after  dinner  on; 
at  which  stage  of  the  evening  I  presented  myself, 
in  the  company  of  my  excellent  friend  Arthur 
Sedgwick,  brother  to  our  hostess  and  who  still 
lives  to  testify,  for  the  honour  of  introduction 
to  the  tremendous  guest.  How  tremendously 
it  had  been  laid  upon  young  persons  of  our 
generation  to  feel  Dickens,  down  to  the  soles  of 
our  shoes,  no  more  modern  instance  that  I  might 
try  to  muster  would  give,  I  think,  the  least 
measure  of;  I  can  imagine  no  actual  young 
person  of  my  then  age,  and  however  like  myself, 
so  ineffably  agitated,  so  mystically  moved,  in 
the  presence  of  any  exhibited  idol  of  the  mind 
who  should  be  in  that  character  at  all  conceivably 
"like"  the  author  of  Pickwick  and  of  Copperfield. 
There  has  been  since  his  extinction  no  correspond 
ing  case  —  as  to  the  relation  between  benefactor 
and  beneficiary,  or  debtor  and  creditor;  no 
other  debt  in  our  time  has  been  piled  so  high, 
for  those  carrying  it,  as  the  long,  the  purely 
"Victorian"  pressure  of  that  obligation.  It 
was  the  pressure,  the  feeling,  that  made  it  —  as 
it  made  the  feeling,  and  no  operation  of  feeling 
on  any  such  ground  has  within  my  observation 
so  much  as  attempted  to  emulate  it.  So  that 


254    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

on  the  evening  I  speak  of  at  Shady  Hill  it  was 
as  a  slim  and  shaken  vessel  of  the  feeling  that  one 
stood  there  —  of  the  feeling  in  the  first  place 
diffused,  public  and  universal,  and  in  the  second 
place  all  unfathomably,  undemonstrably,  un- 
assistedly  and,  as  it  were,  unrewardedly,  proper 
to  one's  self  as  an  already  groping  and  fumbling, 
already  dreaming  and  yearning  dabbler  in  the 
mystery,  the  creative,  that  of  comedy,  tragedy, 
evocation,  representation,  erect  and  concrete 
before  us  there  as  in  a  sublimity  of  mastership. 
I  saw  the  master  —  nothing  could  be  more  evident 
-  in  the  light  of  an  intense  emotion,  and  I 
trembled,  I  remember,  in  every  limb,  while  at 
the  same  time,  by  a  blest  fortune,  emotion 
produced  no  luminous  blur,  but  left  him  shining 
indeed,  only  shining  with  august  particulars.  It 
was  to  be  remarked  that  those  of  his  dress,  which 
managed  to  be  splendid  even  while  remaining 
the  general  spare  uniform  of  the  diner-out,  had 
the  effect  of  higher  refinements,  of  accents 
stronger  and  better  placed,  than  we  had  ever  in 
such  a  connection  seen  so  much  as  hinted.  But 
the  offered  inscrutable  mask  was  the  great  thing, 
the  extremely  handsome  face,  the  face  of  sym 
metry  yet  of  formidable  character,  as  I  at  once 
recognised,  and  which  met  my  dumb  homage 
with  a  straight  inscrutability,  a  merciless  military 
eye,  I  might  have  pronounced  it,  an  automatic 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    255 

hardness,  in  fine,  which  at  once  indicated  to  me, 
and  in  the  most  interesting  way  in  the  world, 
a  kind  of  economy  of  apprehension.  Wonderful 
was  it  thus  to  see,  and  thrilling  inwardly  to  note, 
that  since  the  question  was  of  personal  values  so 
great  no  faintest  fraction  of  the  whole  could 
succeed  in  not  counting  for  interest.  The  con 
frontation  was  but  of  a  moment;  our  introduc 
tion,  my  companion's  and  mine,  once  effected, 
by  an  arrest  in  a  doorway,  nothing  followed,  as 
it  were,  or  happened  (what  might  have  happened 
it  remained  in  fact  impossible  to  conceive);  but 
intense  though  the  positive  perception  there  was 
an  immensity  more  left  to  understand  —  for  the 
long  aftersense,  I  mean;  and  one,  or  the  chief, 
of  these  later  things  was  that  if  our  hero  neither 
shook  hands  nor  spoke,  only  meeting  us  by  the 
barest  act,  so  to  say,  of  the  trained  eye,  the 
penetration  of  which,  to  my  sense,  revealed  again 
a  world,  there  was  a  grim  beauty,  to  one's  subse 
quently  panting  imagination,  in  that  very  truth 
of  his  then  so  knowing  himself  (committed  to  his 
monstrous  "readings"  and  with  the  force  re 
quired  for  them  ominously  ebbing)  on  the  outer 
edge  of  his  once  magnificent  margin.  So  at  any 
rate  I  was  to  like  for  long  to  consider  of  it;  I  was 
to  like  to  let  the  essential  radiance  which  had 
nevertheless  reached  me  measure  itself  by  this 
accompaniment  of  the  pitying  vision.  He 


256    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

couldn't  loosely  spend  for  grace  what  he  had  to 
keep  for  life  —  which  was  the  awful  nightly,  or 
all  but  nightly,  exhibition:  such  the  economy, 
as  I  have  called  it,  in  which  I  was  afterwards  to 
feel  sure  he  had  been  locked  up  —  in  spite  of  the 
appearance,  in  the  passage  from  my  father's 
letter,  of  the  opened  gates  of  the  hour  or  two 
before.  These  were  but  a  reason  the  more, 
really,  for  the  so  exquisitely  complicated  image 
which  was  to  remain  with  me  to  this  day  and 
which  couldn't  on  any  other  terms  have  made 
itself  nearly  so  important.  For  that  was  the 
whole  sense  of  the  matter.  It  hadn't  been  in  the 
least  important  that  we  should  have  shaken 
hands  or  exchanged  platitudes  —  it  had  only  been 
supremely  so  that  one  should  have  had  the 
essence  of  the  hour,  the  knowledge  enriched  by 
proof  that  whatever  the  multifold  or  absolute 
reason,  no  accession  to  sensibility  fronrany  other 
at  all  "similar"  source  could  have  compared, 
for  penetration,  to  the  intimacy  of  this  particular 
and  prodigious  glimpse.  It  was  as  if  I  had 
carried  off  my  strange  treasure  just  exactly  from 
under  the  merciless  military  eye  —  placed  there  on 
guard  of  the  secret.  All  of  which  I  recount  for 
illustration  of  the  force  of  action,  unless  I  call 
it  passion,  that  may  reside  in  a  single  pulse  of 
time. 

I  allow  myself  not  to  hang  back  in  gathering 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    257 

several  passages  from  another  series  for  fear  of 
their  crossing  in  a  manner  the  line  of  privacy  and 
giving  a  distinctness  to  old  intimate  things. 
The  distinctness  is  in  the  first  place  all  to  the 
honour  of  the  persons  and  the  interests  thus 
glimmering  through;  and  I  hold,  in  the  second, 
that  the  light  touch  under  which  they  revive 
positively  adds,  by  the  magic  of  memory,  a 
composite  fineness.  The  only  thing  is  that  to 
speak  of  my  father's  correspondent  here  is  to  be 
more  or  less  involved  at  once  in  the  vision  of  her 
frame  and  situation,  and  that  to  get  at  all  into 
relation  with  "the  Nortons,"  as  they  were  known 
to  us  at  that  period,  to  say  nothing  of  all  the 
years  to  follow,  is  to  find  on  my  hands  a  much 
heavier  weight  of  reference  than  my  scale  at 
this  point  can  carry.  The  relation  had  ripened 
for  us  with  the  settlement  of  my  parents  at 
Cambridge  in  the  autumn  of  '66,  and  might  I 
attempt  even  a  sketch  of  the  happy  fashion  in 
which  the  University  circle  consciously  accepted, 
for  its  better  satisfaction,  or  in  other  words  just 
from  a  sense  of  what  was,  within  its  range,  in  the 
highest  degree  interesting,  the  social  predomi 
nance  of  Shady  Hill  and  the  master  there,  and  the 
ladies  of  the  master's  family,  I  should  find  myself 
rich  in  material.  That  institution  and  its  ad 
ministrators,  however,  became  at  once,  under 
whatever  recall  of  them,  a  picture  of  great  inclu- 


258    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

sions  and  implications;  so  true  is  it  of  any 
community,  and  so  true  above  all  of  one  of  the 
American  communities  best  to  be  studied  fifty 
years  ago  in  their  homogeneous  form  and  native 
essence  and  identity,  that  a  strong  character 
reinforced  by  a  great  culture,  a  culture  great  in 
the  given  conditions,  obeys  an  inevitable  law  in 
simply  standing  out.  Charles  Eliot  Norton  stood 
out,  in  the  air  of  the  place  and  time  —  which  for 
that  matter,  I  think,  changed  much  as  he  changed, 
and  couldn't  change  much  beyond  his  own  range 
of  experiment  —  with  a  greater  salience,  granting 
his  background,  I  should  say,  than  I  have  ever 
known  a  human  figure  stand  out  with  from  any: 
an  effect  involved  of  course  in  the  nature  of  the 
background  as  well  as  in  that  of  the  figure.  He 
profited  at  any  rate,  to  a  degree  that  was  a  lesson 
in  all  the  civilities,  by  the  fact  that  he  represented 
an  ampler  and  easier,  above  all  a  more  curious, 
play  of  the  civil  relation  than  was  to  be  detected 
anywhere  about,  and  a  play  by  which  that  relation 
had  the  charming  art  of  becoming  extraordinarily 
multifold  and  various  without  appearing  to  lose 
the  note  of  rarity.  It  is  not  of  course  through 
any  exhibition  of  mere  multiplicity  that  the 
instinct  for  relations  becomes  a  great  example 
and  bears  its  best  fruit;  the  weight  of  the  example 
and  the  nature  of  the  benefit  depending  so  much 
as  they  do  on  the  achieved  and  preserved  terms 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    259 

of  intercourse.  Here  it  was  that  the  curiosity, 
as  I  have  called  it,  of  Shady  Hill  was  justified  - 
so  did  its  action  prove  largely  humanising.  This 
was  all  the  witchcraft  it  had  used  —  that  of 
manners  understood  with  all  the  extensions  at 
once  and  all  the  particularisations  to  which  it  is 
the  privilege  of  the  highest  conception  of  manners 
to  lend  itself.  What  it  all  came  back  to,  naturally, 
was  the  fact  that,  on  so  happy  a  ground,  the 
application  of  such  an  ideal  and  such  a  genius 
could  find  agents  expressive  and  proportionate, 
and  the  least  that  could  be  said  of  the  ladies  of 
the  house  was  that  they  had  in  perfection  the 
imagination  of  their  opportunity.  History  still 
at  comparatively  close  range  lays  to  its  lips,  I 
admit,  a  warning  finger  —  yet  how  can  I  help 
looking  it  bravely  in  the  face  as  I  name  in  common 
courtesy  Jane  Norton?  She  distilled  civility 
and  sympathy  and  charm,  she  exhaled  humanity 
and  invitation  to  friendship,  which  latter  she 
went  through  the  world  leaving  at  mortal  doors 
as  in  effect  the  revelation  of  a  new  amenity 
altogether  —  something  to  wait,  most  other 
matters  being  meanwhile  suspended,  for  her  to 
come  back  on  a  turn  of  the  genial  tide  and  take 
up  again,  according  to  the  stirred  desire,  with 
each  beneficiary.  All  this  to  the  extent,  more 
over,  I  confess,  that  it  takes  the  whole  of  one's 
measure  of  her  rendered  service  and  her  admirable 


260    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

life,  cut  so  much  too  short  —  it  takes  the  full  list 
of  her  fond  Reclaimers,  the  shyest  with  the 
clearest,  those  who  most  waited  or  most  followed, 
not  to  think  almost  more  of  the  way  her  blest 
influence  went  to  waste  as  by  its  mere  unecono- 
mised  and  selfless  spread  than  of  what  would  have 
been  called  (what  was  by  the  simply-seeing  freely 
enough  called)  her  achieved  success.  It  was 
given  her  at  once  to  shine  for  the  simply -seeing 
and  to  abide  forever  with  the  subtly;  which 
latter,  so  far  as  they  survive,  are  left  again  to 
recognise  how  there  plays  inveterately  within 
the  beautiful,  if  it  but  go  far  enough,  the  fine 
strain  of  the  tragic.  The  household  at  Shady 
Hill  was  leaving  that  residence  early  in  the 
summer  of  '68  for  a  long  stay  in  Europe,  and  the 
following  is  of  that  moment. 

When  I  heard  the  other  day  that  you  had  been  at 
our  house  to  say  farewell  I  was  glad  and  also  sorry, 
glad  because  I  couldn't  say  before  all  the  world  so 
easily  what  I  wanted  to  say  to  you  in  parting,  and 
sorry  because  I  longed  for  another  sight  of  your  beau 
tiful  countenance.  And  then  I  consoled  myself  with 
thinking  that  I  should  write  you  the  next  morning 
and  be  able  to  do  my  feelings  better  justice.  But 
when  the  morning  came  I  saw  how  you  would,  with 
all  your  wealth  of  friends,  scarcely  value  a  puny  chir 
rup  from  one  of  my  like,  and  by  no  means  probably 
expect  it,  and  so  I  desisted.  And  now  comes  your 
heavenly  letter  this  moment  to  renew  my  happiness 
in  showing  me  once  more  your  undimmed  friendly 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    261 

face.  How  delightful  that  face  has  ever  been  to  me 
since  first  I  beheld  it;  how  your  frank  and  gracious 
and  healing  manners  have  shed  on  my  soul  a  celestial 
dew  whenever  I  have  encountered  you:  I  despair  to 
tell  you  in  fitting  words.  You  are  the  largest  and  more 
generous  nature  I  know,  and  one  that  remains  always, 
at  the  same  time,  so  womanly;  and  while  you  leave 
behind  you  such  a  memory  you  needn't  fear  that  our 
affectionate  wishes  will  ever  fail  you  for  a  moment. 
I  for  my  part  shall  rest  in  my  affection  for  you  till  we 
meet  where  to  love  is  to  live. 

Shady  Hill  was  meanwhile  occupied  by  other 
friends,  out  of  the  group  of  which,  especially  as 
reflected  in  another  of  my  father's  letters  to  Miss 
Norton,  there  rise  for  me  beckoning  ghosts; 
against  whose  deep  appeal  to  me  to  let  them 
lead  me  on  I  have  absolutely  to  steel  myself  --so 
far,  for  the  interest  of  it,  I  feel  that  they  might 
take  me. 

We  dined  the  other  night  at  Shady  Hill,  where  the 
Gurneys  were  charming  and  the  company  excellent; 
but  there  was  a  perpetual  suggestion  of  the  Elysian 
Fields  about  the  banquet  to  me,  and  we  seemed  met 
together  to  celebrate  a  memory  rather  than  applaud  a 
hope.  Godkin  and  his  wife  were  there,  and  they 
heartily  lent  themselves  to  discourse  of  you  all.  Ever 
and  anon  his  friendship  gave  itself  such  an  emphatic 
jerk  to  your  address  that  you  might  have  heard  it  on 
your  window-panes  if  you  had  not  been  asleep.  As 
for  her  —  what  a  great  clot  she  is  of  womanly  health, 
beauty  and  benignity!  That  is  a  most  unwonted 
word  to  use  in  such  a  connection,  but  it  came  of  itself, 


262    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

and  I  won't  refuse  it,  as  it  means  to  express  a  wealth 
that  seems  chaotic  —  seems  so  because  apparently  not 
enough  exercised  or  put  to  specific  use.  The  Ash- 
burners  and  Sedgwicks  continue  your  tradition  and 
even  ornament  or  variegate  it  with  their  own  original 
force.  I  go  there  of  a  Sunday  afternoon,  whenever 
possible,  to  read  anew  the  gospel  of  their  beautiful  life 
and  manners  and  bring  away  a  text  for  the  good  of  my 
own  household.  No  one  disputes  the  authenticity  of 
that  gospel,  and  I  have  no  difficulty  in  spreading  its 
knowledge. 

On  which  follows,  as  if  inevitably,  the  tragic 
note  re-echoed;  news  having  come  from  Dresden, 
in  March  '72,  of  the  death  of  Mrs.  Charles  Norton, 
still  young,  delightful,  inestimable. 

What  a  blow  we  have  all  had  in  the  deeper  blow  that 
has  prostrated  you!  I  despair  to  tell  you  how  keen 
and  how  real  a  grief  is  felt  here  by  all  who  have  heard 
the  desolating  news.  With  my  own  family  the  brood 
ing  presence  of  the  calamity  is  almost  as  obvious  as 
it  is  in  the  Kirkland  Street  home,  and  I  have  to  make 
a  perpetual  effort  to  reason  it  down.  Reflectively,  I 
confess,  I  am  somewhat  surprised  that  I  could  have 
been  so  much  surprised  by  an  event  of  this  order.  I 
know  very  well  that  death  is  the  secret  of  life  spirit 
ually,  and  that  this  outward  image  of  death  which 
has  just  obtruded  itself  upon  our  gaze  is  only  an  image 
-  is  wholly  unreal  from  a  spiritual  point  of  view.  I 
know  in  short  that  your  lovely  sister  lives  at  present 
more  livingly  than  she  has  ever  lived  before.  And  yet 
my  life  is  so  low,  habitually,  that  when  I  am  called 
upon  to  put  my  knowledge  into  practice  I  am  as 
superstitious  as  anybody  else  and  grovel  instead  of 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    263 

soaring.  Keep  me  in  your  own  sweet  and  fragrant 
memory,  for  nowhere  else  could  I  feel  myself  more 
embalmed  to  my  own  self-respect.  Indeed  if  anything 
could  relieve  a  personal  sorrow  to  me  it  would  be  the 
sense  that  it  was  shared  by  a  being  so  infinitely  tender 
and  true  as  yourself. 

Of  the  mass  of  letters  by  the  same  hand  that  I 
further  turn  over  too  many  are  of  a  domestic 
strain  inconsistent  with  other  application;  but  a 
page  here  and  there  emerges  clear,  with  elements 
of  interest  and  notes  of  the  characteristic  that 
rather  invite  than  deprecate  an  emphasis.  From 
these  I  briefly  glean,  not  minding  that  later 
dates  are  involved  —  no  particular  hour  at  that 
time  being  far  out  of  touch  with  any  other,  and 
the  value  of  everything  gaining  here,  as  I  feel, 
by  my  keeping  my  examples  together.  The 
following,  addressed  to  me  in  England  early  in 
'69,  beautifully  illustrates,  to  my  sense,  our 
father's  close  participation  in  any  once  quite 
positive  case  that  either  one  or  the  other  of  his 
still  somewhat  undetermined,  but  none  the  less 
interesting  sons  —  interesting  to  themselves,  to 
each  other  and  to  him  —  might  appear  for  the  time 
to  insist  on  constituting.  William  had  in  '68 
been  appointed  to  an  instructorship  in  Psychology 
at  Harvard. 

He  gets  on  greatly  with  his  teaching;  his  students  — 
fifty-seven  of  them  —  are  elated  with  their  luck  in 


264     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

having  him,  and  I  feel  sure  he  will  have  next  year  a 
still  larger  number  attracted  by  his  fame.  He  came  in 
the  other  afternoon  while  I  was  sitting  alone,  and, 
after  walking  the  floor  in  an  animated  way  for  a  mo 
ment,  broke  out:  "Bless  my  soul,  what  a  difference 
between  me  as  I  am  now  and  as  I  was  last  spring  at 
this  time!  Then  so  hypochondriachal "  —  he  used 
that  word,  though  perhaps  less  in  substance  than  form 
—  "and  now  with  my  mind  so  cleared  up  and  re 
stored  to  sanity.  It's  the  difference  between  death 
and  life."  He  had  a  great  effusion.  I  was  afraid  of 
interfering  with  it,  or  possibly  checking  it,  but  I  ven 
tured  to  ask  what  especially  in  his  opinion  had  pro 
duced  the  change.  He  said  several  things :  the  reading 
of  Renouvier  (particularly  his  vindication  of  the  free 
dom  of  the  will)  and  of  Wordsworth,  whom  he  has 
been  feeding  on  now  for  a  good  while;  but  more  than 
anything  else  his  having  given  up  the  notion  that  all 
mental  disorder  requires  to  have  a  physical  basis. 
This  had  become  perfectly  untrue  to  him.  He  saw 
that  the  mind  does  act  irrespectively  of  material  co 
ercion,  and  could  be  dealt  with  therefore  at  first  hand, 
and  this  was  health  to  his  bones.  It  was  a  splendid 
declaration,  and  though  I  had  known  from  unerring 
signs  of  the  fact  of  the  change  I  never  had  been  more 
delighted  than  by  hearing  of  it  so  unreservedly  from 
his  own  lips.  He  has  been  shaking  off  his  respect  for 
men  of  mere  science  as  such,  and  is  even  more  uni 
versal  and  impartial  in  his  mental  judgments  than  I 
have  known  him  before. 

Nothing  in  such  a  report  could  affect  me  more, 
at  a  distance,  as  indeed  nothing  shines  for  me 
more  sacredly  now,  than  the  writer's  perfect 
perception  of  what  it  would  richly  say  to  me, 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    265 

even  if  a  little  to  my  comparative  confusion  and 
bewilderment;  engaged  as  I  must  rightly  have 
appeared  in  working  out,  not  to  say  in  tentatively 
playing  with,  much  thinner  things.  I  like  to 
remember,  as  I  do,  ineffaceably,  that  my  attention 
attached  itself,  intensely  and  on  the  spot,  to  the 
very  picture,  with  whatever  else,  conveyed, 
which  for  that  matter  hangs  before  me  still:  the 
vision  of  my  brother,  agitated  by  the  growth  of 
his  genius,  moving  in  his  burst  of  confidence,  his 
bright  earnestness,  about  the  room  I  knew,  which 
must  have  been  our  admirable  parent's  study  — 
with  that  admirable  parent  himself  almost  holding 
his  breath  for  the  charm  and  the  accepted  peace 
of  it,  after  earlier  discussions  and  reserves;  to 
say  nothing  too,  if  charm  was  in  question,  of  the 
fact  of  rarity  and  beauty  I  must  have  felt,  or  in 
any  case  at  present  feel,  in  the  resource  for  such 
an  intellectually  living  and  fermenting  son  of 
such  a  spiritually  perceiving  and  responding  sire. 
What  was  the  whole  passage  but  a  vision  of 
the  fine  private  luxury  of  each? --with  the  fine 
private  luxury  of  my  own  almost  blurred  image 
of  it  superadded.  Of  that  same  spring  of  '69 
is  another  page  addressed  to  myself  in  Europe. 
My  memory  must  at  the  very  time  have  connected 
itself  with  what  had  remained  to  me  of  our  com 
mon  or  certainly  of  my  own  inveterate,  childish 
appeal  to  him,  in  early  New  York  days,  for 


266    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

repetition,  in  the  winter  afternoon  firelight,  of 
his  most  personal,  most  remembering  and  picture- 
recovering  "story";  that  of  a  visit  paid  by  him 
about  in  his  nineteenth  year,  as  I  make  it  out, 
to  his  Irish  relatives,  his  father's  nephews,  nieces 
and  cousins,  with  a  younger  brother  or  two 
perhaps,  as  I  set  the  scene  forth  —  which  it 
conduced  to  our  liveliest  interest  to  see  "Billy 
Taylor,"  the  negro  servant  accompanying  him 
from  Albany,  altogether  rule  from  the  point  of 
view  of  effect.  The  dignity  of  this  apparition 
indeed,  I  must  parenthesise,  would  have  yielded 
in  general  to  the  source  of  a  glamour  still  more 
marked  -  -  the  very  air  in  which  the  young  emis 
sary  would  have  moved  as  the  son  of  his  father 
and  the  representative  of  an  American  connection 
prodigious  surely  in  its  power  to  dazzle.  William 
James  of  Albany  was  at  that  time  approaching  the 
term  of  his  remarkably  fruitful  career,  and  as  I  see 
the  fruits  of  it  stated  on  the  morrow  of  his  death 
-  in  the  New  York  Evening  Post  of  December 
20th  1832,  for  instance,  I  find  myself  envying 
the  friendly  youth  who  could  bring  his  modest 
Irish  kin  such  a  fairytale  from  over  the  sea.  I 
attach  as  I  hang  upon  the  passage  a  melancholy 
gaze  to  the  cloud  of  images  of  what  might  have 
been  for  us  all  that  it  distractingly  throws  off. 
Our  grandfather's  energy,  exercised  in  Albany 
from  the  great  year  1789,  appears  promptly  to 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    267 

have  begun  with  his  arrival  there.  "Everywhere 
we  see  his  footsteps,  turn  where  we  may,  and 
these  are  the  results  of  his  informing  mind  and 
his  vast  wealth.  His  plans  of  improvement 
embraced  the  entire  city,  and  there  is  scarcely  a 
street  or  a  square  which  does  not  exhibit  some 
mark  of  his  hand  or  some  proof  of  his  opulence. 
With  the  exception  of  Mr.  Astor,"  this  delightful 
report  goes  on  to  declare,  "no  other  business 
man  has  acquired  so  great  a  fortune  in  this  State. 
To  his  enormous  estate  of  three  millions  of 
dollars  there  are  nine  surviving  heirs.  His  en 
terprises  have  for  the  last  ten  years  furnished 
constant  employment  for  hundreds  of  our  me 
chanics  and  labourers."  The  enterprises  appear, 
alas,  to  have  definitely  ceased,  or  to  have  fallen 
into  less  able  hands,  with  his  death  —  and  to 
the  mass  of  property  so  handsomely  computed 
the  heirs  were,  more  exactly,  not  nine  but  a  good 
dozen.  Which  fact,  however,  reduces  but  by  a 
little  the  rich  ambiguity  of  the  question  that  was 
to  flit  before  my  father's  children,  as  they  grew 
up,  with  an  air  of  impenetrability  that  I  remem 
ber  no  attempt  on  his  own  part  to  mitigate.  I 
doubt,  for  that  matter,  whether  he  could  in  the 
least  have  appeased  our  all  but  haunting  wonder 
as  to  what  had  become  even  in  the  hands  of 
twelve  heirs,  he  himself  naturally  being  one,  of 
the  admirable  three  millions.  The  various  happy 


268    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

and  rapid  courses  of  most  of  the  participants 
accounted  for  much,  but  did  they  account  for 
the  full  beautiful  value,  and  would  even  the 
furthest  stretch  of  the  charming  legend  of  his 
own  early  taste  for  the  amusements  of  the  town 
really  tell  us  what  had  been  the  disposition,  by 
such  a  measure,  of  his  share?  Our  dear  parent, 
we  were  later  quite  to  feel,  could  have  told  us 
very  little,  in  all  probability,  under  whatever 
pressure,  what  had  become  of  anything.  There 
had  been,  by  our  inference,  a  general  history  --  not 
on  the  whole  exhilarating,  and  pressure  for 
information  could  never,  I  think,  have  been 
applied;  wherefore  the  question  arrests  me  only 
through  the  brightly  associated  presumption 
that  the  Irish  visit  was  made,  to  its  extreme 
enlivening,  in  the  character  of  a  gilded  youth,  a 
youth  gilded  an  inch  thick  and  shining  to  efful 
gence  on  the  scene  not  otherwise  brilliant.  Which 
image  appeals  to  my  filial  fidelity  —  even  though 
I  hasten  not  to  sacrifice  the  circle  evoked,  that 
for  which  I  a  trifle  unassuredly  figure  a  small 
town  in  county  Cavan  as  forming  an  horizon,fand 
which  consisted,  we  used  to  delight  to  hear  with 
every  contributive  circumstance,  of  the  local 
lawyer,  the  doctor  and  the  (let  us  hope  —  for  we 
did  hope)  principal  "merchant,"  whose  conjoined 
hospitality  appeared,  as  it  was  again  agreeable 
to  know,  to  have  more  than  graced  the  occasion: 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    269 

the  main  definite  pictorial  touches  that  have 
lingered  with  me  being  that  all  the  doors  always 
stood  open,  with  the  vistas  mostly  raking  the 
provision  of  whiskey  on  every  table,  and  that 
these  opportunities  were  much  less  tempting 
(to  our  narrator)  than  that  of  the  quest  of  goose 
berries  in  the  garden  with  a  certain  beautiful 
Barbara,  otherwise  anonymous,  who  was  not  of 
the  kin  but  on  a  visit  from  a  distance  at  one  of 
the  genial  houses.  We  liked  to  hear  about 
Barbara,  liked  the  sound  of  her  still  richer  rarer 
surname;  which  in  spite  of  the  fine  Irish  harmony 
it  even  then  struck  me  as  making  I  have  frivo 
lously  forgotten.  She  had  been  matchlessly  fair 
and  she  ate  gooseberries  with  a  charm  that  was 
in  itself  of  the  nature  of  a  brogue  —  so  that,  as  I 
say,  we  couldn't  have  too  much  of  her;  yet  even 
her  measure  dwindled,  for  our  appetite,  beside 
the  almost  epic  shape  of  black  Billy  Taylor 
carrying  off  at  every  juncture  alike  the  laurel 
and  the  bay.  He  singularly  appealed,  it  was 
clear,  to  the  Irish  imagination,  performing  in  a 
manner  never  to  disappoint  it;  his  young 
master  —  in  those  days,  even  in  the  North,  young 
mastership  hadn't  too  long  since  lapsed  to  have 
lost  every  grace  of  its  tradition  —  had  been  all 
cordially  acclaimed,  but  not  least,  it  appeared, 
because  so  histrionically  attended:  he  had  been 
the  ringmaster,  as  it  were,  of  the  American  circus, 


270    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

the  small  circus  of  two,  but  the  other  had  been 
the  inimitable  clown.  My  point  is  that  we 
repaired  retrospectively  to  the  circus  as  in 
satiably  as  our  Irish  cousins  had  of  old  attended 
it  in  person  —  even  for  the  interest  of  which  fact, 
however,  my  father's  words  have  led  me  too  far. 
What  here  follows,  I  must  nevertheless  add, 
would  carry  me  on  again,  for  development  of 
reference,  should  I  weakly  allow  it.  The  allusion 
to  my  brother  Wilky's  vividly  independent  verbal 
collocations  and  commentative  flights  re-echoes 
afresh,  for  instance,  as  one  of  the  fond  by-words 
that  spoke  most  of  our  whole  humorous  harmony. 
Just  so  might  the  glance  at  the  next  visitor 
prompt  a  further  raising  of  the  curtain,  save  that 
this  is  a  portrait  to  which,  for  lack  of  acquaintance 
with  the  original,  I  have  nothing  to  contribute  - 
beyond  repeating  again  that  it  was  ever  the  sign 
of  my  father's  portraits  to  supply  almost  more 
than  anything  else  material  for  a  vision  of  himself. 

Your  enjoyment  of  England  reminds  me  of  my 
feelings  on  my  first  visit  there  forty  years  ago  nearly, 
when  I  landed  in  Devonshire  in  the  month  of  May  or 
June  and  was  so  intoxicated  with  the  roads  and  lanes 
and  hedges  and  fields  and  cottages  and  castles  and  inns 
that  I  thought  I  should  fairly  expire  with  delight.  You 
can't  expatiate  too  much  for  our  entertainment  on 
your  impressions,  though  you  make  us  want  con- 
sumedly  to  go  over  and  follow  in  your  footsteps. 
Wilky  has  been  at  home  now  for  2  or  3  days  and  is 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    271 

very  philosophic  and  enthusiastic  over  your  letters. 
I  hoped  to  remember  some  of  his  turns  of  speech  for 
you,  but  one  chases  another  out  of  my  memory  and  it 
is  now  all  a  blank.  I  will  consult  Alice's  livelier  one 
before  I  close. 

My  friend  -  —  is  a  tropical  phenomenon,  a  favour 
ite  of  nature  whatever  his  fellow  man  may  say  of  him. 
His  face  and  person  are  handsome  rather  than  other 
wise,  and  it's  obvious  that  he  is  a  very  unsoiled  and 
pure  piece  of  humanity  in  all  personal  regards.  And 
with  such  a  gift  of  oratory  —  such  a  boundless  wealth 
of  diction  set  off  by  copious  and  not  ungraceful  gestic 
ulation!  Here  is  where  he  belongs  to  the  tropics, 
where  nature  claims  him  for  her  own  and  flings  him 
like  a  cascade  in  the  face  of  conventional  good-breeding. 
I  can't  begin  to  describe  him,  he  is  what  I  have  never 
before  met.  I  see  that  he  can't  help  turning  out  ex 
cessively  tiresome,  but  he  is  not  at  all  vulgar.  He 
has  a  genius  for  elocution,  that  is  all;  but  a  real  genius 
and  no  mistake.  In  comparison  with  Mr.  F.  L.  or 
Mr.  Longfellow  or  the  restrained  Boston  style  of  ad 
dress  generally,  he  is  what  the  sunflower  is  to  the  snow 
drop;  but  on  the  whole,  if  I  could  kick  his  shins  when 
ever  I  should  like  to  and  so  reduce  him  to  silence,  I 
prefer  him  to  the  others. 

What  mainly  commends  to  me  certain  other 
passages  of  other  dates  (these  still  reaching  on  a 
little)  is  doubtless  the  fact  that  I  myself  show  in 
them  as  the  object  of  attention  and  even  in  a 
manner  as  a  claimant  for  esthetic  aid.  This 
latter  active  sympathy  overflows  in  a  letter  of 
the  spring  of  '70,  which  would  be  open  to  more 
elucidation  than  I  have,  alas,  space  for.  Let 


272    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

the  sentence  with  which  it  begins  merely  remind 
me  that  Forrest,  the  American  actor,  of  high 
renown  in  his  time,  and  of  several  of  whose 
appearances  toward  the  close  of  his  career  I  keep 
a  memory  uneffaced -- the  impression  as  of  a 
deep-toned  thunderous  organ,  a  prodigious  instru 
ment  pounded  by  a  rank  barbarian  —  had  been 
literally,  from  what  we  gathered,  an  early  comrade 
of  our  parent:  literally,  I  say,  because  the 
association  could  seem  to  me,  at  my  hours  of 
ease,  so  bravely  incongruous.  By  my  hours 
of  ease  I  mean  those  doubtless  too  devoted  to 
that  habit  of  wanton  dispersed  embroidery  for 
which  any  scrap  of  the  human  canvas  would 
serve.  From  one  particular  peg,  I  at  the  same 
time  allow,  the  strongest  sense  of  the  incongruity 
depended  —  my  remembrance,  long  entertained, 
of  my  father's  relating  how,  on  an  occasion,  which 
must  have  been  betimes  in  the  morning,  of  his 
calling  on  the  great  tragedian,  a  man  of  enormous 
build  and  strength,  the  latter,  fresh  and  dripping 
from  the  bath,  had  entered  the  room  absolutely 
upside  down,  or  by  the  rare  gynmastic  feat  of 
throwing  his  heels  into  the  air  and  walking,  as 
with  strides,  on  his  hands;  an  extraordinary 
performance  if  kept  up  for  more  than  a  second  or 
two,  and  the  result  at  any  rate  of  mere  exuberance 
of  muscle  and  pride  and  robustious  joie  de  vivre. 
It  had  affected  me,  the  picture,  as  one  of  those 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    273 

notes   of   high   colour   that   the   experience   of   a 

young  Albany  viveur,  the  like  of  which  I  felt  I 

was  never  to  come  in  for,  alone  could  strike  off; 

but  what  was  of  the  finer  profit  in  it  was  less  the 

direct    illustration    of    the    mighty    mountebank 

than   of   its   being   delightful   on   the   part   of   a 

domestic  character  we  so  respected  to  have  had, 

with    everything    else,    a    Bohemian    past   too  - 

since  I  couldn't  have  borne  at  such  moments  to 

hear  it  argued  as  not  Bohemian.     What  did  his 

having  dropped  in  after  such  a  fashion  and  at  a 

late  breakfast-hour  on  the  glory  of  the  footlights 

and  the  idol  of  the  town,  what  did  it  fall  in  with 

but  the  kind  of  thing  one  had  caught  glimpses 

and  echoes  of  from  the  diaries  and  memoirs,  so 

far  as  these  had  been  subject  to  the  passing  peep, 

of  the  giftedly   idle   and   the  fashionably   great, 

the    Byrons,    the    Bulwers,    the    Pelhams,    the 

Coningsbys,    or    even,    for    a    nearer    vividness 

perhaps,  the  N.  P.  Willises?  —  of  all  of  whom  it 

\vas  somehow  more  characteristic  than  anything 

else,  to  the  imagination,  that  they  always  began 

their  day  in  some  such  fashion.     Even  if  I  cite 

this  as  a  fair  example  of  one's  instinct  for  making 

much  of  a  little  —  once  this  little,  a  chance  handful 

of  sand,  could  show  the  twinkle  of  the  objective, 

or  even  the  reflective,  grain  of  gold  —  I  still  claim 

value  for  that  instanced  felicity,  as  I  felt  it,  of 

being  able  to  yearn,  thanks  to  whatever  chance 


274    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

support,  over  Bohemia,  and  yet  to  have  proof 
in  the  paternal  presence  close  at  hand  of  how 
well  even  the  real  frequentation  of  it,  when 
achieved  in  romantic  youth,  might  enable  a 
person  at  last  to  turn  out.  The  lesson  may  now 
indeed  seem  to  have  been  one  of  those  that  rather 
more  strictly  adorn  a  tale  than  point  a  moral; 
but  with  me,  at  that  period,  I  think,  the  moral 
ever  came  first  and  the  tale  more  brilliantly 
followed.  As  for  the  recital,  in  such  detail,  of 
the  theme  of  a  possible  literary  effort  which  the 
rest  of  my  letter  represents,  how  could  I  feel  this, 
when  it  had  reached  me,  as  anything  but  a  sign 
of  the  admirable  anxiety  with  which  thought 
could  be  taken,  even  though  "amateurishly,"  in 
my  professional  interest?  —  since  professional  I 
by  that  time  appeared  able  to  pass  for  being. 
And  how  above  all  can  it  not  serve  as  an  exhibi 
tion  again  of  the  manner  in  which  all  my  benev 
olent  backer's  inveterate  original  malaise  in 
face  of  betrayed  symptoms  of  the  impulse  to 
"narrow  down"  on  the  part  of  his  young  found 
its  solution  always,  or  its  almost  droll  simplifica 
tion,  as  soon  as  the  case  might  reach  for  him 
a  personal  enough,  or  "social"  enough,  as  he 
would  have  said,  relation  to  its  fruits?  Then 
the  malaise  might  promptly  be  felt  as  changed, 
by  a  wave  of  that  wand,  to  the  extremity  of 
active  and  expatiative  confidence. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    275 

Horatio  Alger  is  writing  a  Life  of  Edwin  Forrest,  and 
I  am  afraid  will  give  him  a  Bowery  appreciation.  He 
reports  his  hero  as  a  very  "fine"  talker  —  in  which 
light  I  myself  don't  so  much  recall  him,  though  he  had 
a  native  breadth  —  as  when  telling  Alger  for  example 
of  old  Gilbert  Stuart's  having  when  in  a  state  of 
dilapidation  asked  him  to  let  him  paint  his  portrait. 
"I  consented,"  said  Forrest,  "and  went  to  his  studio. 
He  was  an  old  white  lion,  so  blind  that  he  had  to  ask 
me  the  colour  of  my  eyes  and  my  hair;  but  he  threw 
his  brush  at  the  canvas,  and  every  stroke  was  life." 
Alger  talks  freely  about  his  own  late  insanity  —  which 
he  in  fact  appears  to  enjoy  as  a  subject  of  conversa 
tion  and  in  which  I  believe  he  has  somewhat  interested 
William,  who  has  talked  with  him  a  good  deal  of  his 
experience  at  the  Somerville  Asylum.  Charles  Grinnell 

-  though  not  a  propos  of  the  crazy  —  has  become  a 
great   reader   and   apparently   a   considerable   under- 
stander    of    my    productions;     Alger    aforesaid   aussi. 
Everyone  hopes  that  J.  G.  hasn't  caught  a  Rosamund 
Vincy  in  Miss  M.     I  don't  know  whether  this  hope 
means  affection  to  J.  or  disaffection  to  the  young  lady. 

I  have  written  to  Gail  Hamilton  to  send  me  your 
story;  but  she  does  it  not  as  yet.  I  will  renew  my 
invitation  to  her  in  a  day  or  two  if  necessary.  I  went 
to  see  Osgood  lately  about  his  publishing  a  selection 
from  your  tales.  He  repeated  what  he  had  told  you 

-  that  he  would  give  you  15  per  cent  and  do  all  the 
advertising,   etc.,   you  paying  for   the  plates;    or  he 
would  pay  everything  and  give  you  10  per  cent  on 
every  copy  sold  after  the  first  thousand.     I  shall  be 
glad  (in  case  you  would  like  to  publish,  and  I  think 
it  time  for  you  to  do  so)  to  meet  the  expense  of  your 
stereotyping,  and  if  you  will  pick  out  what  you  would 
like  to  be  included  we  shall  set  to  work  at  once  and 
have  the  book  ready  by  next  autumn.     I  have  mean- 


276    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

while  the  materials  of  a  story  for  you  which  I  was 
telling  William  of  the  other  day  as  a  regular  Tour- 
geneff  subject,  and  he  urged  me  to  send  it  off  to  you 
at  once  —  he  was  so  struck  with  it. 

Matthew  Henry  W.  was  a  very  cultivated  and  ac 
complished  young  man  in  Albany  at  the  time  I  was 
growing  up.  He  belonged  to  a  highly  respectable 
family  of  booksellers  and  publishers  and  was  himself 
bred  to  the  law;  but  had  such  a  love  of  literature,  and 
more  especially  of  the  natural  sciences,  that  he  never 
devoted  himself  strictly  to  his  profession.  He  was  the 
intimate  friend  of  my  dear  old  tutor,  Joseph  Henry 
of  the  Smithsonian,  and  of  other  distinguished  men  of 
science;  he  corresponded  with  foreign  scientific  bodies, 
and  his  contributions  to  science  generally  were  of  so 
original  a  cast  as  to  suggest  great  hopes  of  his  future 
eminence.  He  was  a  thorough  gentleman,  of  perfect 
address  and  perfect  courage  —  utterly  unegotistic,  and 
one's  wonder  was  how  he  had  ever  grown  up  in  Albany 
or  resigned  himself  to  living  there.  One  day  he  in 
vested  his  money,  of  which  he  had  a  certain  quantity, 
in  a  scheme  much  favoured  by  the  president  of  the 
bank  in  which  he  deposited,  and  this  adventure  proved 
a  fortune.  There  lived  near  us  as  well  a  family  of  the 

name  of  K ,  your  cousin  Mary  Minturn  Post's 

stepmother  being  of  its  members;  and  this  family 
reckoned  upon  a  great  social  sensation  in  bringing  out 
their  youngest  daughter,  Lydia  Sibyl,  who  had  never 
been  seen  by  mortal  eye  outside  her  own  immediate 
circle,  save  that  of  a  physician  who  reported  that  she 
was  fabulously  beautiful.  She  was  the  most  beautiful 
girl  I  think  I  ever  saw,  at  a  little  distance.  Well,  she 
made  her  sensation  and  brought  Matthew  Henry 
promptly  to  her  feet.  Her  family  wanted  wealth 
above  all  things  for  her;  but  here  was  wealth  and 
something  more,  very  much  more,  and  they  smiled 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    277 

upon  his  suit.  Everything  went  merrily  for  a  while  — 
M.  H.  was  deeply  intoxicated  with  his  prize.  Never 
was  man  so  enamoured,  and  never  was  beauty  better 
fitted  to  receive  adoration.  She  was  of  an  exquisite 
Grecian  outline  as  to  face,  with  a  countenance  like  the 
tender  dawn  and  form  and  manners  ravishingly  grace 
ful.  But  W.  was  not  content  with  his  adventure  —  he 
embarked  again  and  lost  almost  all  he  owned.  The 
girl's  father  —  or  her  mother  rather,  being  the  ruler 
of  the  family  and  as  hard  as  the  nether  world  at  heart 
—  gave  the  cue  to  her  daughter  and  my  friend  was 
dismissed.  He  couldn't  believe  his  senses,  he  raved 
and  cursed  his  fate,  but  it  was  inexorable.  What  was 
to  be  done?  With  a  bitterness  of  heart  inconceivable 
he  plucked  his  revenge  by  marrying  at  once  a  stout 
and  blooming  jade  who  was  to  Lydia  Sibyl  as  a  peony 
to  a  violet,  absolutely  nothing  but  flesh  and  blood. 
Her  he  bore  upon  his  arm  at  fashionable  hours  through 
the  streets;  her  he  took  to  church,  preserving  his  ad 
mirable  ease  and  courtesy  to  everyone,  as  if  absolutely 
nothing  had  occurred;  and  her  he  pretended  to  take 
to  his  bosom  in  private,  with  what  a  shudder  one 
can  imagine.  Everybody  stood  aghast.  He  went  daily 
about  his  affairs,  as  serene  and  unconscious  apparently 
as  the  moon  in  the  heavens.  Soon  his  poverty  showed 
itself  in  certain  economies  of  his  attire,  which  had  al 
ways  been  most  recherche.  Soon  again  he  broke  his 
leg  and  went  about  on  crutches,  but  neither  poverty 
nor  accident  had  the  least  power  to  ruffle  his  air  of 
equanimity.  He  was  always  superior  to  his  circum 
stances,  met  you  exactly  as  he  had  always  done,  im 
pressed  you  always  as  the  best-bred  man  you  knew, 
and  left  you  wondering  what  a  heart  and  what  a  brain 
lay  behind  such  a  fortune.  One  morning  we  all  read 
in  the  newspaper  at  breakfast  that  Mr.  M.  H.  W. 
had  appealed  the  day  before  to  the  protection  of  the 


278    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

police  against  his  wife,  who  had  taken  to  beating  him 
and  whom  as  a  woman  he  couldn't  deal  with  by  strik 
ing  back;  and  the  police  responded  properly  to  his 
appeal.  He  went  about  his  affairs  as  usual  that  day 
and  every  day,  never  saying  a  word  to  any  one  of 
his  trouble  nor  even  indirectly  asking  sympathy,  but 
making  you  feel  that  here  if  anywhere  was  a  rare  kind 
of  manhood,  a  self-respect  so  eminent  as  to  look  down 
with  scorn  on  the  refuges  open  to  ordinary  human 
weakness.  This  lasted  five  or  six  years.  He  never 
drank  or  took  to  other  vices,  and  lived  a  life  of  such 
decorum,  so  far  as  his  own  action  was  concerned,  a  life 
of  such  interest  and  science  and  literature,  as  to  be  the 
most  delightful  and  unconscious  of  companions  even 
when  his  coat  was  at  the  last  shabbiness  and  you 
didn't  dare  to  look  at  him  for  fear  of  betraying  your 
own  vulgar  misintelligence.  Finally  Lydia  Sibyl  died 
smitten  with  smallpox  and  all  her  beauty  gone  to 
hideousness.  He  lingered  awhile,  his  charming  man 
ners  undismayed  still,  his  eye  as  undaunted  as  at  the 
beginning,  and  then  he  suddenly  died.  I  never  knew 
his  equal  for  a  manly  force  competent  to  itself  in  every 
emergency  and  seeking  none  of  the  ordinary  subter 
fuges  that  men  so  often  seek  to  hide  their  imbecility. 
I  think  it  a  good  basis.  .  .  . 

Returning  from  Europe  in  June  '70,  after  a 
stay  there  of  some  fifteen  months,  I  had  crossed 
the  sea  eastward  again  two  years  later,  with  my 
sister  and  our  admirable  aunt  as  companions  - 
leaving  them,  I  may  mention,  to  return  home 
at  the  end  of  six  months  while  I  betook  myself 
to  Italy,  where  I  chiefly  remained  till  the  autumn 
of  '74.  The  following  expresses  our  father's 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    279 

liberality  of  recognition  and  constant  tenderness 
of  tone  in  a  manner  that  no  comment  need  em 
phasise,  but  at  one  or  two  of  his  references  I 
allow  myself  to  glance.  I  happen  to  remember 
perfectly  for  instance  the  appearance  of  the  novel 
of  Madame  Sand's  that  he  so  invidiously  alludes 
to  in  one  of  the  first  numbers  of  the  cherished 
Revue  that  reached  us  after  the  siege  of  Paris 
had  been  raised  —  such  a  pathetically  scant 
starved  pale  number,  I  quite  recall,  as  expressed 
the  share  even  of  the  proud  periodical  in  the  late 
general  and  so  tragic  dearth;  with  which  it 
comes  back  to  me  that  I  had  myself  a  bit  critically 
mused  on  the  characteristic  queerness,  the  oddity 
of  the  light  thrown  on  the  stricken  French  con 
sciousness  by  the  prompt  sprouting  of  such  a 
flower  of  the  native  imagination  in  the  chill  air 
of  discipline  accepted  and  after  the  administration 
to  that  consciousness  of  a  supposedly  clarifying 
dose.  But  I  hadn't  gone  the  length  of  my  father, 
who  must  have  taken  up  the  tale  in  its  republished 
form,  a  so  slim  salmon-coloured  volume  this 
time:  oh  the  repeated  arrival,  during  those 
years,  of  the  salmon-coloured  volumes  in  their 
habit  as  they  lived,  a  habit  reserved,  to  my 
extreme  appreciation,  for  this  particular  series, 
and  that,  enclosing  the  extraordinarily  fresh 
fruit  of  their  author's  benign  maturity,  left 
Tamaris  and  Valvedre  and  Mademoiselle  La 


280    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

Quintinie  in  no  degree  ever  "discounted"  for  us 
as  devotees  of  the  Revue,  I  make  out,  by  their 
being  but  renewals  of  acquaintance.  The  sense 
of  the  salmon-coloured  distinctive  of  Madame 
Sand  was  even  to  come  back  to  me  long  years 
after  on  my  hearing  Edmond  de  Goncourt  speak 
reminiscentially  and,  I  permit  myself  to  note,  not 
at  all  reverently,  of  the  robe  de  satin  fleur-de-pecher 
that  the  illustrious  and  infatuated  lady,  whose 
more  peculiar  or  native  tint,  as  Blanche  Amory 
used  to  say,  didn't  contribute  to  a  harmony, 
s'etait  fait  faire  in  order  to  fix  as  much  as  possible 
the  attention  of  Gustave  Flaubert  at  the  Diner 
Magny;  of  Gustave  Flaubert,  who,  according  to 
this  most  invidious  of  reporters,  disembroiled 
from  each  other  with  too  scant  ease  his  tangle 
of  possibly  incurred  ridicule  from  the  declared 
sentiment  of  so  old  a  woman,  even  in  a  peach- 
blossom  dress,  and  the  glory  reflected  on  him  by 
his  admirer's  immense  distinction.  Which  vision 
of  a  complicated  past,  recovered  even  as  I  write  — 
and  of  a  past  indeed  contemporary  with  the  early 
complacencies  I  attribute  to  ourselves  —  doesn't 
at  all  blur  its  also  coming  back  to  me  that  I 
was  to  have  found  my  parent  "hard  on"  poor 
Francia  in  spite  of  my  own  comparative  reserves; 
these  being  questions  and  shades  that  I  rejoice 
to  think  of  our  having  had  so  discussionally,  and 
well  at  home  for  the  most  part,  the  social  educa- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    281 

tion  of.  I  see  that  general  period  as  quite 
flushed  and  toned  by  the  salmon-coloured  covers; 
so  that  a  kind  of  domestic  loyalty  would  ever 
operate,  as  we  must  have  all  felt,  to  make  us 
take  the  thick  with  the  thin  and  not  y  regarder 
for  a  Francia  the  more  or  the  less.  When  I  say 
all  indeed  I  doubtless  have  in  mind  especially 
my  parents  and  myself,  with  my  sister  and  our 
admirable  aunt  (in  her  times  of  presence)  thrown 
in  -  -  to  the  extent  of  our  subjection  to  the  charm 
of  such  matters  in  particular  as  La  Famille  de 
Germandre,  La  Ville  Noire,  Nanon  and  L'Homme 
de  Neige,  round  which  last  above  all  we  sat 
ranged  in  united  ecstasy;  so  that  I  was  to 
wonder  through  the  after  years,  and  I  think 
perhaps  to  this  day,  how  it  could  come  that  a 
case  of  the  "story"  strain  at  its  finest  and  purest, 
a  gush  of  imaginative  force  so  free  and  yet  so 
artfully  directed,  shouldn't  have  somehow  "stood 
out"  more  in  literary  history.  Perhaps  indeed 
L'Homme  de  Neige  does  essentially  stand  out 
in  the  unwritten  parts  of  that  record  —  which  are 
content  to  be  mere  tacit  tender  tradition;  for 
all  the  world  as  if,  since  there  are  more  or  less 
dreadful  perpetuated  books,  by  the  hundred, 
dreadful  from  whatever  baseness  or  whatever 
scantness,  that  for  shame,  as  it  were,  we  never 
mention,  so  one  may  figure  others  as  closeted  in 
dimness  (than  which  there  is  nothing  safer)  by 


282    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

the  very  scruple  of  respect  at  its  richest.  I  hover 
for  instance  about  the  closet  of  L'Homme  de 
Neige,  I  stand  outside  a  moment  as  if  listening 
for  a  breath  from  within;  but  I  don't  open  the 
door,  you  see  —  which  must  mean,  in  all  proba 
bility,  that  I  wouldn't  for  the  world  inconsider 
ately  finger  again  one  of  the  three  volumes;  that 
meaning,  in  its  turn,  doubtless,  that  I  have 
heard  the  breath  I  had  listened  for  and  that  it 
can  only  have  been  what  my  argument  wants, 
the  breath  of  life  unquenched.  Isn't  it  relevant 
to  this  that  when  she  was  not  reading  Trollope 
our  dear  mother  was  reading  "over"  La  Famille 
de  Germandre,  which,  with  several  of  its  com 
panions  of  the  same  bland  period,  confirmed  her 
in  the  sense  that  there  was  no  one  like  their  author 
for  a  "love-story"?  —  a  conviction,  however, 
that  when  made  articulate  exposed  her  to  the 
imputation  of  a  larger  tolerance  than  she  doubt 
less  intended  to  project;  till  the  matter  was 
cleared  up  by  our  generally  embracing  her  for 
so  sweetly  not  knowing  about  Valentine  and 
Jacques  and  suchlike,  and  having  only  begun  at 
La  Mare  au  Diable  and  even  thereafter  been 
occasionally  obliged  to  skip. 

So  far  do  I  let  myself  go  while,  to  recur  to  my 
letter,  Chauncey  Wright  sits  for  me  in  his  custom 
ary  corner  of  the  deep  library  sofa  and  his  strange 
conflictingly  conscious  light  blue  eyes,  appealing 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    283 

across  the  years  from  under  the  splendid  arch 
of  his  fair  head,  one  of  the  handsomest  for  repre 
sentation  of  amplitude  of  thought  that  it  was 
possible  to  see,  seems  to  say  to  me  with  a  softness 
more  aimed  at  the  heart  than  any  alarm  or  any 
challenge:  "But  what  then  are  you  going  to 
do  for  me?"  I  find  myself  simply  ache,  I  fear, 
as  almost  the  only  answer  to  this  —  beyond  his 
figuring  for  me  as  the  most  wasted  and  doomed, 
the  biggest  at  once  and  the  gentlest,  of  the  great 
intending  and  unproducing  (in  anything  like  the 
just  degree)  bachelors  of  philosophy,  bachelors 
of  attitude  and  of  life.  And  as  he  so  sits,  loved 
and  befriended  and  welcomed,  valued  and  invoked 
and  vainly  guarded  and  infinitely  pitied,  till  the 
end  couldn't  but  come,  he  renews  that  appeal  to 
the  old  kindness  left  over,  as  I  may  say,  and 
which  must  be  more  or  less  known  to  all  of  us, 
for  the  good  society  that  was  helplessly  to  miss 
a  right  chronicler,  and  the  names  of  which,  so 
full  at  the  time  of  their  fine  sense,  were  yet  to  be 
writ  in  water.  Chauncey  Wright,  of  the  great 
imperfectly -attested  mind;  Jane  Norton,  of  the 
train,  so  markedly,  of  the  distinguished,  the 
sacrificial,  devoted;  exquisite  Mrs.  Gurney,  of 
the  infallible  taste,  the  beautiful  hands  and  the 
tragic  fate;  Gurney  himself,  for  so  long  Dean  of 
the  Faculty  at  Harvard  and  trusted  judge  of 
all  judgments  (this  latter  pair  the  subject  of  my 


284     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

father's  glance  at  the  tenantship  of  Shady  Hill 
in  the  Nortons'  absence:)  they  would  delightfully 
adorn  a  page  and  appease  a  piety  that  is  still 
athirst  if  I  hadn't  to  let  them  pass.  Harshly 
condemned  to  let  them  pass,  and  looking  wistfully 
after  them  as  they  go,  how  can  I  yet  not  have 
inconsequently  asked  them  to  turn  a  moment 
more  before  disappearing? 

My  heart  turns  to  you  this  morning,  so  radiant  in 
the  paternal  panoply  you  wear  toward  Alice  and  your 
aunt,  and  I  would  give  a  great  deal  to  see  you.  The 
enclosed  scrap  of  a  letter  from  William  is  sent  to  show 
you  how  vastly  improved  are  his  eyes,  especially  when 
you  shall  have  learned  that  he  has  written  us  within 
the  last  four  or  five  days  twenty  pages  of  like  density 
to  these.  He  would  fain  persuade  us  to  go  to  Mount 
Desert;  perhaps  later  we  may  go  to  Quebec,  but  we  are 
so  comfortable  together  reading  Trollope  and  talking 
philosophy  that  we  cheerfully  drop  the  future  from  our 
regard.  Mamma  is  free  and  active  and  bracing.  She 
is  a  domestic  nor'wester,  carrying  balm  and  bloom  into 
every  nook  and  corner  of  her  empire.  .  .  .  She  hangs 
over  The  Eustace  Diamonds  while  I  try  vainly  to  read 
George  Sand's  Francia.  I  have  come  across  nothing 
of  that  lady's  that  reflects  a  baser  light  on  her  personal 
history.  What  must  a  woman  have  been  through  to 
want  to  grovel  at  this  time  of  day  in  such  uncleanness? 
Don't  buy  it  —  I  wish  I  hadn't!  The  new  North 
American  is  out,  with  a  not  too  interesting  article  of 
Chauncey  Wright's  on  Mivart,  a  scandalous  (in  point 
of  taste)  essay  of  Mr.  Stirling  on  Buckle,  full  of  Scotch 
conceit,  insolence  and  "wut;"  a  very  very  laboured 
article  by  James  Lowell  on  Dante,  in  which  he  de- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    285 

termines  to  exhaust  all  knowledge;  and  these  are  all 
I  have  read.  Mr.  Stirling  of  course  makes  Buckle 
ridiculous,  but  he  stamps  himself  a  shabby  creature. 

I  find  the  following,  addressed  to  his  daughter 
in  August  '72,  so  beautifully  characteristic  of  our 
parents'  always  explicit  admonition  to  us,  in  our 
dependent  years,  against  too  abject  an  impulse 
to  be  frugal  in  their  interests,  that  I  may  fairly 
let  it  stand  as  a  monument  to  this  particular 
aspect  of  their  affection. 

Your  and  H.'s  last  letters  bring  tears  of  joy  to  our 
eyes.  It's  a  delight  above  all  delights  to  feel  one's 
children  turn  out  all  that  the  heart  covets  in  children. 
Your  conviction  is  not  up  to  the  truth.  Our  "tender 
thoughts"  of  you  are  so  constant  that  I  have  hardly 
been  able  to  settle  to  anything  since  you  have  been 
gone.  I  can  do  little  else  than  recount  to  myself  "the 
tender  mercies  of  the  Lord"  to  me  and  my  household. 
Still  I  am  not  wholly  useless;  I  try  to  write  every  day, 
and  though  I  haven't  my  daughter  at  hand  to  look 
after  my  style  and  occasionally  after  my  ideas,  I  man 
age  to  do  a  little.  Your  conscientious  economy  is 
excessively  touching,  but  it's  a  little  overstrained. 
You  needn't  be  afraid  of  putting  us  to  any  embarrass 
ment  so  long  as  your  expenses  don't  exceed  their  pres 
ent  rate;  and  you  can  buy  all  you  want  in  Paris  with 
out  stretching  your  tether  a  particle.  This  is  Mamma's 
message  as  well  as  mine.  Charles  Atkinson  wishes 
me  to  say  that  Monte  Genneroso  above  Lugano  Lake 
—  the  P.O.  Mendrisio  —  offers  a  wondrous  climate; 
and  Mamma  thinks  —  so  fearful  is  she  that  you  will 
descend  into  Italy  before  the  warm  weather  is  over 


286    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

and  so  compromise  your  strength  —  that  you  had 
either  better  go  there  awhile  first  or  else  be  ready  to 
retreat  on  it  in  case  you  find  the  summer  heat  in  Venice 
impossible. 

Nor  does  this  scrap  from  a  letter  to  myself 
at  the  same  season  breathe  a  spirit  less  liberal  - 
so  far  as  the  sympathy  with  whatever  might  pass 
for  my  fondest  preoccupations  was  concerned. 
These  were  now  quite  frankly  recognised  as  the 
arduous  attempt  to  learn  somehow  or  other  to 
write. 

I  send  you  The  Nation,  though  there  seems  nothing 
in  it  of  your  own,  and  I  think  I  never  fail  to  recognise 
you.  A  notice  of  Gustave  Droz's  Babolain  (by  T.  S. 
P.,  I  suppose)  there  is;  which  book  I  read  the  other 
day.  This  fumbling  in  the  cadaver  of  the  old  world, 
however,  only  disgusts  me  when  so  unrelieved  as  in  this 
case  by  any  contrast  or  any  souffle  of  inspiration  such 
as  you  get  in  Tourgueneff.  It's  curious  to  observe 
how  uncertain  the  author's  step  is  in  this  story  —  how 
he  seems  always  on  the  look-out  for  some  chance  to 
break  away.  But  it  has  mastered  him,  he  can't  lay 
the  ghost  he  has  conjured. 

To  which  I  should  limit  myself  for  the  com 
memoration  of  that  group  of  years  by  the  gentle 
aid  of  the  always  vivid  excerpt,  were  it  not  that 
I  have  before  me  a  considerable  cluster  of  letters 
addressed  by  the  writer  of  the  foregoing  to  Mr. 
J.  Eliot  Cabot,  most  accomplished  of  Bostonians, 
most  "cultivated"  even  among  the  cultivated, 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    287 

as  we  used  to  say,  and  of  a  philosophic  acuteness 
to  which  my  father  highly  testified,  with  which 
indeed  he  earnestly  contended.  The  correspon 
dence  in  question  covered,  during  the  years  I 
include,  philosophic  ground  and  none  other; 
but  though  no  further  exhibition  of  it  than  this 
reference  may  convey  is  to  my  purpose  I  lay  it 
under  contribution  to  the  extent  of  a  passage  or 
two  just  for  the  pleasure  of  inviting  recognition, 
as  I  invite  it  wherever  we  meet  an  instance,  of 
the  fashion  after  which  the  intensely  animated 
soul  can  scarce  fail  of  a  harmony  and  a  consistency 
of  expression  that  are  nothing  less  than  interesting, 
that  in  fact  become  at  once  beautiful,  in  them 
selves.  By  which  remark  I  nevertheless  do  not 
mean  to  limit  the  significance  of  the  writer's  side 
of  his  long  argument  with  Mr.  Eliot  Cabot,  into 
which  I  may  not  pretend  to  enter,  nor  the  part 
that  in  any  such  case  a  rare  gift  for  style  must 
inveterately  play. 

I  grant  then  that  I  am  often  tempted  to  conceive,  as 
I  read  your  letters,  that  we  differ  only  in  your  terms 
being  more  abstract,  mine  more  concrete;  and  yet  I 
really  don't  think  this  difference  is  exhaustive.  If  I 
thought  Philosophy  capable  ever  of  being  reduced  to 
logical  compass  or  realising  itself  as  science,  I  should 
give  in  at  once.  But  this  is  just  what  I  cannot  think. 
Philosophy  is  the  doctrine  exclusively  of  the  infinite  in 
the  finite,  and  deals  with  the  latter  therefore  only  as 
a  mask,  only  as  harbouring  the  former.  But  if  you 


288    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

formulate  it  scientifically  your  terms  are  necessarily  all 
finite,  as  furnished  by  experience,  and  the  infinite  is 
excluded  or  at  most  creeps  in  as  the  indefinite  —  Hegel's 
becoming  for  example.  Thus  Hegel's  dialectic  modu 
lates  only  in  the  sphere  of  his  distance.  His  being  is 
universal  existence,  and,  as  universals  have  only  a 
logical  truth,  being  in  se  is  equivalent  to  Nothing. 
But  Nothing  hasn't  even  a  logical  basis.  Lithe  as 
human  thought  is  it  can't  compass  the  conception. 
It  is  a  mere  brutum  fulmen  devised  to  disguise  the 
absence  of  thought  or  its  inanition;  and  Hegel,  if  he 
had  been  wise,  would  have  said  no-thought  instead  of 
no-thing.  For  no-thing  doesn't  express  the  complete 
absence  of  existence.  Existence  is  of  two  sorts,  real 
and  personal,  sensible  and  conscious,  quantitative  and 
qualitative.  The  most  you  are  entitled  to  say  there 
fore  when  existence  disappears  in  quantitative,  real 
or  sensible,  form  is  that  it  has  been  taken  up  into  purely 
qualitative,  personal  or  conscious  form;  no-thing  being 
the  logical  equivalent  of  all-person.  Thus  I,  who  in 
Hegel's  formula  presumably  extract  existence  from 
being,  survive  the  operation  as  person,  and  though  I  am 
most  clearly  no-thing  I  am  yet  not  being.  Indeed  I  am 
not  even  existence  any  longer,  since  by  knocking  thing 
out  of  being  I  have  forfeited  my  own  reality,  and  con 
sent  henceforth  to  be  pure  personality,  i.e.  phenome- 
nality.  And  personal  or  phenomenal  existence  is  con 
stituted  by  referring  itself  to  a  foreign  source,  or,  what 
is  the  same  thing,  confessing  itself  created:  so  that 
the  fundamental  word  of  Philosophy,  by  Hegel's  own 
formula,  is  creation;  which,  however,  as  I  understand 
him,  he  denies  in  any  objective  sense  of  the  word. 
This  then  is  what  I  complain  of  in  him  —  with  defer 
ence  of  course  to  your  better  knowledge,  which,  how 
ever,  you  do  not  urge  as  yet  in  what  seems  to  me  a 
silencing  way  —  that  he  makes  existence  essential  to 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    289 

being,  so  that  take  existence  away  and  being  becomes 
nothing.  It  would  not  be  a  whit  less  preposterous  in 
me  to  say  that  thought  is  essential  to  thing,  subject  to 
object,  marble  to  statue,  canvas  to  picture,  woman  to 
wife,  mother  to  child.  It  is  literally  putting  the  cart 
before  the  horse  and  converting  Philosophy  to  a  prac 
tical  quagmire.  Being  implies  existence  of  course  just 
as  picture  implies  canvas,  or  as  personality  implies 
reality,  or  as  chick  implies  egg;  but  it  implies  it  only 
to  a  lower  intelligence  than  itself,  an  unspiritual  in 
telligence  to  wit,  which  has  no  direct  or  inward  in 
tuition  of  being,  and  requires  to  be  agitated  to  dis 
cerning  it.  When  I  recognise  the  spiritual  life  of  Art 
I  never  think  of  marble  or  canvas  as  entering  even  con 
ditionally  into  its  manifestations. 

But  I  hold  my  case  for  a  rare  command  of 
manner  thus  proved,  and  need  go  no  further; 
the  more  that  I  have  dropped  too  many  of  those 
threads  of  my  rather  niggled  tapestry  that  belong 
but  to  the  experience  of  my  own  weaving  hand 
and  the  interplay  of  which  represents  thereby 
a  certain  gained  authority.  I  disentangle  these 
again,  if  the  term  be  not  portentous,  though 
reflecting  too,  and  again  with  complacency,  that 
though  I  thus  prize  them  as  involved  most  in 
my  own  consciousness,  this  is  just  because  of 
their  attachment  somewhere  else  to  other  matters 
and  other  lives. 


IX 

I  WENT  up  from  Newport  to  Cambridge  early 
in  the  autumn  of  '62,  and  on  one  of  the  oddest 
errands,  I  think,  that,  given  the  several  cir 
cumstances,  I  could  possibly  have  undertaken.  I 
was  nineteen  years  old,  and  it  had  seemed  to  me 
for  some  time  past  that  some  such  step  as  my 
entering  for  instance  the  Harvard  Law  School 
more  or  less  urgently  concerned  what  I  could  but 
try  to  help  myself  out  by  still  putting  forward 
as  my  indispensable  education  —  I  am  not  sure 
indeed  that  the  claim  didn't  explicitly  figure,  or 
at  least  successfully  dangle,  as  that  of  my  possibly 
graceful  mere  "culture."  I  had  somehow  —  by 
which  I  mean  for  reasons  quite  sufficient  —  to  fall 
back  on  the  merciful  "mere"  for  any  statement 
of  my  pretensions  even  to  myself:  so  little  they 
seemed  to  fit  into  any  scheme  of  the  conventional 
maximum  as  compared  with  those  I  saw  so 
variously  and  strongly  asserted  about  me,  espe 
cially  since  the  outbreak  of  the  War.  I  am  not 
sure  whether  I  yet  made  bold  to  say  it,  but  I 
should  surely  be  good  for  nothing,  all  my  days, 
if  not  for  projecting  into  the  concrete,  by  hook 

290 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    291 

or  by  crook  —  that  is  my  imagination  shamelessly 
aiding  —  some  show  of  (again)  mere  life.  This  im 
pression  was  not  in  the  least  the  flag  I  publicly 
brandished;  in  fact  I  must  have  come  as  near  as 
possible  to  brandishing  none  whatever,  a  sound 
instinct  always  hinting  to  me,  I  gather,  that  the 
time  for  such  a  performance  was  much  more 
after  than  before  —  before  the  perfect  place  had 
been  found  for  the  real  planting  of  the  standard 
and  the  giving  of  its  folds  to  the  air.  No  such 
happy  spot  had  been  marked,  decidedly,  at  that 
period,  to  my  inquiring  eye;  in  consequence  of 
which  the  emblazoned  morsel  (hoisted  sooner  or 
later  by  all  of  us,  I  think,  somehow  and  some 
where),  might  have  passed  for  the  hour  as  a  light 
extravagant  bandanna  rolled  into  the  tight  ball 
that  fits  it  for  hiding  in  the  pocket.  There  it 
considerably  stayed,  so  far  as  I  was  concerned; 
and  all  the  more  easily  as  I  can  but  have  felt  how 
little  any  particular  thing  I  might  meanwhile 
"do"  would  matter  —  save  for  some  specious 
appearance  in  it.  This  last,  I  recognise,  had  for 
me  a  virtue  —  principally  that  of  somehow  gaining 
time;  though  I  hasten  to  add  that  my  approach 
to  the  Law  School  can  scarcely,  as  a  means  to 
this  end,  in  the  air  of  it  that  comes  back  to  me, 
have  been  in  the  least  deceptive.  By  which  I 
mean  that  my  appearance  of  intentions,  qualifica 
tions,  possibilities,  or  whatever  else,  in  the  con- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

nection,  hadn't  surely  so  much  as  the  grace  of 
the  specious.  I  spoke  above  of  the  assumed 
"  indispensability "  of  some  show  of  my  being 
further  subject  to  the  "education"  theory,  but 
this  was  for  the  moment  only  under  failure  to 
ask  to  whom,  or  for  what,  such  a  tribute  was 
indispensable.^  The  interest  to  myself  would 
seem  to  have  been,  as  I  recover  the  sense  of  the 
time,  that  of  all  the  impossibilities  of  action  my 
proceeding  to  Cambridge  on  the  very  vaguest 
grounds  that  probably  ever  determined  a  resi 
dence  there  might  pass  for  the  least  flagrant;  as 
I  breathe  over  again  at  any  rate  the  comparative 
confidence  in  which  I  so  moved  I  feel  it  as  a 
confidence  in  the  positive  saving  virtue  of  vague 
ness.  Could  I  but  work  that  force  as  an  ideal 
I  felt  it  must  see  me  through,  for  the  beauty  of 
it  in  that  form  was  that  it  should  absolutely 
superabound.  I  wouldn't  have  allowed,  either, 
that  it  was  vaguer  to  do  nothing;  for  in  the  first 
place  just  staying  at  home  when  everyone  was 
on  the  move  couldn't  in  any  degree  show  the 
right  mark:  to  be  properly  and  perfectly  vague 
one  had  to  be  vague  about  something;  mere 
inaction  quite  lacked  Jthe  note  —  it  was  nothing 
but  definite  and  dull  I  thought  of  the  Law 
School  experiment,  I  remember,  in  all  sorts  of 
conceivable  connections,  but  in  the  connection 
of  dulness  surely  never  for  an  hour.  I  thought 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    293 

of  it  under  the  head  of  "life"  —  by  which  term 
at  the  same  time,  I  blush  to  confess,  I  didn't  in 
the  least  mean  free  evening  access  to  Boston  in  a 
jangling  horse-car,  with  whatever  extension  this 
might  give  to  the  joy  of  the  liberated  senses.  I 
simply  meant  —  well,  what  was  monstrously  to 
happen;  which  I  shall  be  better  inspired  here  to 
deal  with  as  a  demonstration  made  in  its  course 
than  as  a  premonition  relatively  crude  and  at 
the  time  still  to  be  verified.  Marked  in  the  whole 
matter,  however  these  things  might  be,  was  that 
irony  of  fate  under  the  ugly  grin  of  which  I  found 
my  father  reply  in  the  most  offhand  and  liberal 
manner  to  my  remark  that  the  step  in  question  - 
my  joining,  in  a  sense,  my  brother  at  Cambridge  - 
wouldn't  be  wholly  unpracticable.  It  might  have 
been,  from  his  large  assent  to  it,  a  masterstroke 
of  high  policy.  A  certain  inconsequence  in  this 
left  me  wondering  why  then  if  the  matter  was  now 
so  natural  it  hadn't  been  to  his  mind  a  year 
before  equally  simple  that  I  should  go  to  college, 
and  to  that  College,  after  a  more  showy,  even 
though  I  see  it  would  have  been  at  the  same 
time  a  less  presumptuous,  fashion.  To  have 
deprecated  the  "college  course"  with  such 
emphasis  only  so  soon  afterwards  to  forswear  all 
emphasis  and  practically  smile,  in  mild  oblivion, 
on  any  Harvard  connection  I  might  find  it  in  me 
to  take  up,  was  to  bring  it  home,  I  well  recall, 


294    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

that  the  case  might  originally  have  been  much 
better  managed. 

All  of  which  would  seem  to  kick  up  more  dust 
than  need  quite  have  hung  about  so  simple  a 
matter  as  my  setting  forth  to  the  Cambridge 
scene  with  no  design  that  I  could  honourably 
exhibit.  A  superficial  account  of  the  matter 
would  have  been  that  my  father  had  a  year  or 
two  earlier  appeared  to  think  so  ill  of  it  as  to 
reduce  me,  given  the  "delicacy,"  the  inward,  not 
then  the  outward,  which  I  have  glanced  at,  to 
mild  renunciation  —  mild  I  say  because  I  re 
member  in  fact,  rather  to  my  mystification  now, 
no  great  pang  of  disappointment,  no  soreness  of 
submission.  I  didn't  want  anything  so  much  as  I 
wanted  a  certain  good  (or  wanted  thus  supremely 
to  want  it,  if  I  may  say  so),  with  which  a  con 
ventional  going  to  college  wouldn't  have  so 
tremendously  much  to  do  as  for  the  giving  it  up 
to  break  my  heart  —  or  an  unconventional  not- 
going  so  tremendously  much  either.  What  I 
"wanted  to  want"  to  be  was,  all  intimately, 
just  literary;  a  decent  respect  for  the  standard 
hadn't  yet  made  my  approach  so  straight  that 
there  weren't  still  difficulties  that  might  seem  to 
meet  it,  questions  it  would  have  to  depend  on. 
Passing  the  Harvard  portal  positively  failed  in 
fact  to  strike  me  as  the  shorter  cut  to  literature; 
the  sounds  that  rose  from  the  scene  as  I  caught 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    295 

them  appeared  on  the  contrary  the  most  detached 
from  any  such  interest  that  had  ever  reached  my 
ear.  Merely  to  open  the  door  of  the  big  square 
closet,  the  ample  American  closet,  to  the  like 
of  which  Europe  had  never  treated  us,  on  the 
shelves  and  round  the  walls  of  which  the  pink 
Revues  sat  with  the  air,  row  upon  row,  of  a  choir 
of  breathing  angels,  was  to  take  up  that  particu 
lar,  that  sacred  connection  in  a  way  that  put 
the  coarser  process  to  shame.  The  drop  of  the 
Harvard  question  had  of  a  truth  really  meant, 
as  I  recover  it,  a  renewed  consecration  of  the 
rites  of  that  chapel  where  the  taper  always 
twinkled  —  which  circumstance  I  mention  as  not 
only  qualifying  my  sense  of  loss,  but  as  symbolis 
ing,  after  a  queer  fashion,  the  independence, 
blest  vision  (to  the  extent,  that  is,  of  its  being  a 
closer  compact  with  the  life  of  the  imagination), 
that  I  should  thus  both  luckily  come  in  for  and 
designingly  cultivate:  cultivate  in  other  words 
under  the  rich  cover  of  obscurity.  I  have  already 
noted  how  the  independence  was,  ever  so  few 
months  later,  by  so  quaint  a  turn,  another  mere 
shake  of  the  tree,  to  drop  into  my  lap  in  the  form 
of  a  great  golden  apple  —  a  value  not  a  simple 
windfall  only  through  the  fact  that  my  father's 
hand  had  after  all  just  lightly  loosened  it.  This 
accession  pointed  the  moral  that  there  was  no 
difficulty  about  anything,  no  intrinsic  difficulty; 


296     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

so  that,  to  re-emphasise  the  sweet  bewilderment, 
I  was  to  "go"  where  I  liked  in  the  Harvard 
direction  and  do  what  I  liked  in  the  Harvard 
relation.  Such  was  the  situation  as  offered  me; 
though  as  I  had  to  take  it  and  use  it  I  found  in 
it  no  little  difference.  Two  things  and  more 
had  come  up --the  biggest  of  which,  and  very 
wondrous  as  bearing  on  any  circumstance  of 
mine,  as  having  a  grain  of  weight  to  spare  for  it, 
was  the  breaking  out  of  the  War.  The  other, 
the  infinitely  small  affair  in  comparison,  was  a 
passage  of  personal  history  the  most  entirely 
personal,  but  between  which,  as  a  private  catas 
trophe  or  difficulty,  bristling  with  embarrass 
ments,  and  the  great  public  convulsion  that 
announced  itself  in  bigger  terms  each  day,  I  felt 
from  the  very  first  an  association  of  the  closest, 
yet  withal,  I  fear,  almost  of  the  least  clearly 
expressible.  Scarce  at  all  to  be  stated,  to  begin 
with,  the  queer  fusion  or  confusion  established 
in  my  consciousness  during  the  soft  spring  of 
'61  by  the  firing  on  Fort  Sumter,  Mr.  Lincoln's 
instant  first  call  for  volunteers  and  a  physical 
mishap,  already  referred  to  as  having  overtaken 
me  at  the  same  dark  hour,  and  the  effects  of 
which  were  to  draw  themselves  out  incalculably 
and  intolerably.  Beyond  all  present  notation 
the  interlaced,  undivided  way  in  which  what  had 
happened  to  me,  by  a  turn  of  fortune's  hand,  in 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    297 

twenty  odious  minutes,  kept  company  of  the 
most  unnatural  --  I  can  call  it  nothing  less  —  with 
my  view  of  what  was  happening,  with  the 
question  of  what  might  still  happen,  to  everyone 
about  me,  to  the  country  at  large:  it  so  made 
of  these  marked  disparities  a  single  vast  visitation. 
One  had  the  sense,  I  mean,  of  a  huge  comprehen 
sive  ache,  and  there  were  hours  at  which  one 
could  scarce  have  told  whether  it  came  most 
from  one's  own  poor  organism,  still  so  young  and 
so  meant  for  better  things,  but  which  had  suffered 
particular  wrong,  or  from  the  enclosing  social 
body,  a  body  rent  with  a  thousand  wounds  and 
that  thus  treated  one  to  the  honour  of  a  sort 
of  tragic  fellowship.  The  twenty  minutes  had 
sufficed,  at  all  events,  to  establish  a  relation  —  a 
relation  to  everything  occurring  round  me  not 
only  for  the  next  four  years  but  for  long  afterward 
-that  was  at  once  extraordinarily  intimate  and 
quite  awkwardly  irrelevant.  I  must  have  felt 
in  some  befooled  way  in  presence  of  a  crisis  —  the 
smoke  of  Charleston  Bay  still  so  acrid  in  the  air  - 
at  which  the  likely  young  should  be  up  and  doing 
or,  as  familiarly  put,  lend  a  hand  much  wanted; 
the  willing  youths,  all  round,  were  mostly  starting 
to  their  feet,  and  to  have  trumped  up  a  lameness 
at  such  a  juncture  could  be  made  to  pass  in  no 
light  for  graceful.  Jammed  into  the  acute  angle 
between  two  high  fences,  where  the  rhythmic  play 


298    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

of  my  arms,  in  tune  with  that  of  several  other  pairs, 
but  at  a  dire  disadvantage  of  position,  induced 
a  rural,  a  rusty,  a  quasi-extemporised  old  engine 
to  work  and  a  saving  stream  to  flow,  I  had  done 
myself,  in  face  of  a  shabby  conflagration,  a  horrid 
even  if  an  obscure  hurt;  and  what  was  interesting 
from  the  first  was  my  not  doubting  in  the  least 
its  duration -- though  what  seemed  equally  clear 
was  that  I  needn't  as  a  matter  of  course  adopt 
and  appropriate  it,  so  to  speak,  or  place  it  for 
increase  of  interest  on  exhibition.  The  interest 
of  it,  I  very  presently  knew,  would  certainly  be 
of  the  greatest,  would  even  in  conditions  kept  as 
simple  as  I  might  make  them  become  little  less 
than  absorbing.  The  shortest  account  of  what 
was  to  follow  for  a  long  time  after  is  therefore  to 
plead  that  the  interest  never  did  fail.  It  was 
naturally  what  is  called  a  painful  one,  but  it 
consistently  declined,  as  an  influence  at  play, 
to  drop  for  a  single  instant.  Circumstances,  by 
a  wonderful  chance,  overwhelmingly  favoured  it  - 
as  an  interest,  an  inexhaustible,  I  mean;  since 
I  also  felt  in  the  whole  enveloping  tonic  atmos 
phere  a  force  promoting  its  growth.  Interest, 
the  interest  of  life  and  of  death,  of  our  national 
existence,  of  the  fate  of  those,  the  vastly  numer 
ous,  whom  it  closely  concerned,  the  interest  of 
the  extending  War,  in  fine,  the  hurrying  troops, 
the  transfigured  scene,  formed  a  cover  for  every 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    299 

sort  of  intensity,  made  tension  itself  in  fact 
contagious  —  so  that  almost  any  tension  would 
do,  would  serve  for  one's  share. 

I  have  here,  I  allow,  not  a  little  to  foreshorten 
—  have  to  skip  sundry  particulars,  certain  of  the 
steps  by  which  I  came  to  think  of  my  relation  to 
my  injury  as  a  modus  vivendi  workable  for  the 
time.  These  steps  had  after  the  first  flush  of 
reaction  inevitably  had  to  be  communications  of 
my  state,  recognitions  and  admissions;  which 
had  the  effect,  I  hasten  to  add,  of  producing 
sympathies,  supports  and  reassurances.  I  gladly 
took  these  things,  I  perfectly  remember,  at  that 
value;  distinct  to  me  as  it  still  is  nevertheless 
that  the  indulgence  they  conveyed  lost  part  of 
its  balm  by  involving  a  degree  of  publication. 
Direfully  distinct  have  remained  to  me  the 
conditions  of  a  pilgrimage  to  Boston  made  that 
summer  under  my  father's  care  for  consultation 
of  a  great  surgeon,  the  head  of  his  profession 
there;  whose  opinion  and  advice  —  the  more  that 
he  was  a  guaranteed  friend  of  my  father's  —  had 
seemed  the  best  light  to  invoke  on  the  less  and 
less  bearable  affliction  with  which  I  had  been 
for  three  or  four  months  seeking  to  strike  some 
sort  of  bargain:  mainly,  up  to  that  time,  under 
protection  of  a  theory  of  temporary  supine 
"rest"  against  which  everything  inward  and 
outward  tended  equally  to  conspire.  Agitated 


300    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

scraps  of  rest,  snatched,  to  my  consciousness, 
by  the  liveliest  violence,  were  to  show  for  futile 
almost  to  the  degree  in  which  the  effort  of  our 
interview  with  the  high  expert  was  afterwards 
so  to  show;  the  truth  being  that  this  interview 
settled  my  sad  business,  settled  it  just  in  that 
saddest  sense,  for  ever  so  long  to  come.  This 
was  so  much  the  case  that,  as  the  mere  scene  of 
our  main  appeal,  the  house  from  which  we  had 
after  its  making  dejectedly  emerged  put  forth  to 
me  as  I  passed  it  in  many  a  subsequent  season 
an  ironic  smug  symbolism  of  its  action  on  my 
fate.  That  action  had  come  from  the  complete 
failure  of  our  approached  oracle  either  to  warn, 
to  comfort  or  to  command --to  do  anything  but 
make  quite  unassistingly  light  of  the  bewilder 
ment  exposed  to  him.  In  default  of  other 
attention  or  suggestion  he  might  by  a  mere 
warning  as  to  gravities  only  too  possible,  and 
already  well  advanced,  have  made  such  a  differ 
ence;  but  I  have  little  forgotten  how  I  felt 
myself,  the  warning  absent,  treated  but  to  a 
comparative  pooh-pooh  —  an  impression  I  long 
looked  back  to  as  a  sharp  parting  of  the  ways, 
with  an  adoption  of  the  wrong  one  distinctly 
determined.  It  was  not  simply  small  comfort, 
it  was  only  a  mystification  the  more,  that  the 
inconvenience  of  my  state  had  to  reckon  with 
the  strange  fact  of  there  being  nothing  to  speak 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    301 

of  the  matter  with  me.  The  graceful  course,  on 
the  whole  ground  again  (and  where  moreover 
was  delicacy,  the  proposed,  the  intended,  without 
grace?)  was  to  behave  accordingly,  in  good  set 
terms,  as  if  the  assurance  were  true;  since  the 
time  left  no  margin  at  all  for  one's  gainsaying 
with  the  right  confidence  so  high  an  authority. 
There  were  a  hundred  ways  to  behave  —  in  the 
general  sense  so  freely  suggested,  I  mean;  and 
I  think  of  the  second  half  of  that  summer  of 
'62  as  my  attempt  at  selection  of  the  best.  The 
best  still  remained,  under  closer  comparisons, 
very  much  what  it  had  at  first  seemed,  and  there 
was  in  fact  this  charm  in  it  that  to  prepare  for 
an  ordeal  essentially  intellectual,  as  I  surmised, 
might  justly  involve,  in  the  public  eye,  a  season 
of  some  retirement.  The  beauty  was  —  I  can 
fairly  see  it  now,  through  the  haze  of  time,  even 
as  beauty !  -  -  that  studious  retirement  and  pre 
paratory  hours  did  after  all  supply  the  supine 
attitude,  did  invest  the  ruefulness,  did  deck  out 
the  cynicism  of  lying  down  book  in  hand  with 
a  certain  fine  plausibility.  This  was  at  least  a 
negative  of  combat,  an  organised,  not  a  loose 
and  empty  one,  something  definitely  and  firmly 
parallel  to  action  in  the  tented  field;  and  I  well 
recall,  for  that  matter,  how,  when  early  in  the 
autumn  I  had  in  fact  become  the  queerest  of 
forensic  recruits,  the  bristling  horde  of  my  Law 


302    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

School  comrades  fairly  produced  the  illusion  of 
a  mustered  army.  The  Cambridge  campus  was 
tented  field  enough  for  a  conscript  starting  so 
compromised;  and  I  can  scarce  say  moreover 
how  easily  it  let  me  down  that  when  it  came  to 
the  point  one  had  still  fine  fierce  young  men,  in 
great  numbers,  for  company,  there  being  at  the 
worst  so 'many  such  who  hadn't  flown  to  arms. 
I  was  to  find  my  fancy  of  the  merely  relative 
right  in  any  way  to  figure,  or  even  on  such  terms 
just  to  exist,  I  was  to  find  it  in  due  course  quite 
drop  from  me  as  the  Cambridge  year  played 
itself  out,  leaving  me  all  aware  that,  full  though 
the  air  might  be  of  stiffer  realities,  one  had  yet  a 
rare  handful  of  one's  own  to  face  and  deal  with. 

At  Cambridge  of  course,  when  I  got  there,  I 
was  further  to  find  my  brother  on  the  scene  and 
already  at  a  stage  of  possession  of  its  contents 
that  I  was  resigned  in  advance  never  to  reach; 
so  thoroughly  I  seemed  to  feel  a  sort  of  quickening 
savoury  meal  in  any  cold  scrap  of  his  own  experi 
ence  that  he  might  pass  on  to  my  palate.  This 
figure  has  definite  truth,  that  is,  but  for  associa 
tion  at  the  board  literally  yielding  us  nourishment 
-  the  happiest  as  to  social  composition  and 
freedom  of  supply  of  all  the  tables  d'hote  of  those 
days,  a  veritable  haunt  of  conversation  ruled  by 
that  gently  fatuous  Miss  Upham  something  of 
whose  angular  grace  and  antique  attitude  has 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    303 

lived  again  for  us  in  William's  letters.  I  place 
him,  if  not  at  the  moment  of  my  to  that  extent 
joining  him  then  at  least  from  a  short  time 
afterwards,  in  quarters  that  he  occupied  for  the 
next  two  or  three  years  —  quiet  cloistered  rooms, 
as  they  almost  appeared  to  me,  in  the  compara 
tively  sequestered  Divinity  Hall  of  that  still 
virtually  rustic  age;  which,  though  mainly 
affected  to  the  use  of  post-graduates  and  others, 
of  a  Unitarian  colour,  enrolled  under  Harvard's 
theological  Faculty,  offered  chance  accommoda 
tion,  much  appreciated  for  a  certain  supposedly 
separate  charm,  not  to  say  a  finer  dignity,  by 
the  more  maturely  studious  in  other  branches  as 
well.  The  superstition  or  aftertaste  of  Europe 
had  then  neither  left  me  nor  hinted  that  it  ever 
might;  yet  I  recall  as  a  distinct  source  of  inter 
est,  to  be  desperately  dealt  with,  and  dealt  with 
somehow  to  my  inward  advantage,  the  special 
force  of  the  circumstance  that  I  was  now  for  the 
first  time  in  presence  of  matters  normally,  entirely, 
consistently  American,  and  that  more  particularly 
I  found  myself  sniff  up  straight  from  the  sources, 
such  as  they  unmistakably  were,  the  sense  of 
that  New  England  which  had  been  to  me  till 
then  but  a  name.  This  from  the  first  instant 
was  what  I  most  took  in,  and  quite  apart  from 
the  question  of  what  one  was  going  to  make  of  it, 
of  whether  one  was  going,  in  the  simple  formula, 


304     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

to  like  it,  and  of  what  would  come,  could  the 
impression  so  triumph,  of  such  monstrous  assimi 
lations.  Clear  to  me  in  the  light  thus  kindled 
that  my  American  consciousness  had  hitherto 
been  after  all  and  at  the  best  singularly  starved, 
and  that  Newport  for  instance,  during  the 
couple  of  years,  had  fed  it  but  with  sips  of  an 
adulterated  strain.  Newport,  with  its  opera- 
glass  turned  for  ever  across  the  sea  —  for  Newport, 
or  at  least  our  Newport,  even  during  the  War, 
lived  mainly,  and  quite  visibly,  by  the  opera- 
glass —  was  comparatively,  and  in  its  degree 
incurably,  cosmopolite;  and  though  on  our  first 
alighting  there  I  had  more  or  less  successfully, 
as  I  fancied,  invited  the  local  historic  sense*  to 
vibrate,  it  was  at  present  left  me  to  feel  myself 
a  poor  uninitiated  creature.  However,  an  initia 
tion,  at  least  by  the  intelligence,  into  some  given 
thing  —  almost  anything  really  given  would  do  - 
was  essentially  what  I  was,  as  we  nowadays  say, 
after;  the  fault  with  my  previous  data  in  the 
American  kind  had  been  that  they  weren't 
sufficiently  given;  so  that  here  would  be  Boston 
and  Cambridge  giving  as  with  absolute  authority. 
The  War  had  by  itself  of  course,  on  the  ground 
I  speak  of,  communicated  something  of  the 
quality,  or  rather  of  the  quantity,  otherwise 
deficient;  only  this  was  for  my  case,  of  which 
alone  I  speak,  an  apprehension  without  a  language 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    305 

or  a  channel  —  a  revelation  as  sublime  as  one 
would  like  to  feel  it,  but  spreading  abroad  as  a 
whole  and  not,  alas,  by  any  practice  of  mine, 
reducible  to  parts.  What  I  promptly  made  out 
at  Cambridge  was  that  "America"  would  be 
given,  as  I  have  called  it,  to  a  tune  altogether 
fresh,  so  that  to  hear  this  tune  wholly  played  out 
might  well  become  on  the  spot  an  inspiring 
privilege.  If  I  indeed,  I  should  add,  said  to 
myself  "wholly,"  this  was  of  course  not  a  little 
straining  a  point;  since,  putting  my  initiation, 
my  grasp  of  the  exhibition,  at  its  conceivable 
liveliest,  far  more  of  the  supposed  total  was  I 
inevitably  to  miss  than  to  gather  to  my  use. 
But  I  might  gather  what  I  could,  and  therein 
was  exactly  the  adventure.  To  rinse  my  mouth 
of  the  European  aftertaste  in  order  to  do  justice 
to  whatever  of  the  native  bitter-sweet  might 
offer  itself  in  congruous  vessels  —  such  a  brave 
dash  for  discovery,  and  such  only,  would  give 
a  sense  to  my  posture.  With  which  it  was 
unmistakable  that  I  shouldn't  in  the  least  have 
painfully  to  strive;  of  such  a  force  of  impact 
was  each  impression  clearly  capable  that  I  had 
much  rather  to  steady  myself,  at  any  moment, 
where  I  stood,  and  quite  to  a  sense  of  the  luxury 
of  the  occasion,  than  to  cultivate  inquiry  at  the 
aggressive  pitch.  There  was  no  need  for  curiosity 
—  it  was  met  by  every  object,  I  seemed  to  see, 


306    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

so  much  more  than  half  way;  unless  indeed  I 
put  it  better  by  saying  that  as  all  my  vision 
partook  of  that  principle  the  impulse  and  the 
object  perpetually  melted  together.  It  wasn't 
for  instance  by  the  faintest  process  of  inquiry 
that  the  maison  Upham,  where  I  three  times 
daily  sat  at  meat,  had  scarce  to  wait  an  hour  to 
become  as  vivid  a  translation  into  American 
terms  of  Balzac's  Maison  Vauquer,  in  Le  Pere 
Goriot,  as  I  could  have  desired  to  deal  with. 

It  would  have  been  at  once  uplifting  to  see 
in  the  American  terms  a  vast  improvement  on 
the  prime  version,  had  I  not  been  here  a  bit 
baffled  by  the  sense  that  the  correspondence  was 
not  quite,  after  all,  of  like  with  like,  and  that  the 
main  scene  of  Balzac's  action  was  confessedly 
and  curiously  sordid  and  even  sinister,  whereas 
its  equivalent  under  the  Harvard  elms  would 
rank  decidedly  as  what  we  had  de  mieux,  or  in 
other  words  of  most  refined,  in  the  "boarding" 
line,  to  show.  I  must  have  been  further  con 
scious  that  what  we  had  de  mieux  in  the  social 
line  appeared  quite  liable,  on  occasion,  to  board 
wherever  it  might  —  the  situation  in  Balzac's 
world  being  on  this  head  as  different  as  possible. 
No  one  not  deeply  distressed  or  dismally  involved 
or  all  but  fatally  compromised  could  have  taken 
the  chances  of  such  an  establishment  at  all;  so 
that  any  comparison  to  our  own  particular 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    307 

advantage  had  to  be,  on  reflection,  nipped  in  the 
bud.  There  was  a  generic  sameness,  none  the 
less,  I  might  still  reason;  enough  of  that  at  least 
to  show  the  two  pictures  as  each  in  its  way 
interesting  —  which  was  all  that  was  required. 
The  Maison  Vauquer,  its  musty  air  thick  with 
heavier  social  elements,  might  have  been  more 
so,  for  the  Harvard  elms  overhung  no  strange 
Vautrin,  no  old  Goriot,  no  young  Rastignac; 
yet  the  interest  of  the  Kirkland  Street  company 
couldn't,  so  to  speak,  help  itself  either,  any  more 
than  I  could  help  taking  advantage  of  it.  In  one 
respect  certainly,  in  the  matter  of  talk  as  talk, 
we  shone  incomparably  brighter;  and  if  it  took 
what  we  had  de  mieux  to  make  our  so  regular 
resort  a  scene  essentially  of  conversation,  the 
point  was  none  the  less  that  our  materials  were 
there.  I  found  the  effect  of  this,  very  easily, 
as  American  as  I  liked  —  liked,  that  is,  to  think 
of  it  and  to  make  all  I  might  of  it  for  being; 
about  which  in  truth  all  difficulty  vanished  from 
the  moment  the  local  colour  of  the  War  broke  in. 
So  of  course  this  element  did  at  that  season  come 
back  to  us  through  every  outward  opening,  and 
mean  enough  by  contrast  had  been  the  questions 
amid  which  the  Vauquer  boarders  grubbed. 
Anything  even  indirectly  touched  by  our  public 
story,  stretching  now  into  volume  after  volume 
of  the  very  biggest  print,  took  on  that  reflected 


308     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

light  of  dignity,  of  importance,  or  of  mere  gross 
salience,  which  passion  charged  with  criticism, 
and  criticism  charged  with  the  thousand  menaced 
affections  and  connections,  the  whole  of  the 
reaction  —  charged  in  short  with  immediate  inti 
mate  life  —  have  a  power,  in  such  conditions,  to 
fling  as  from  a  waving  torch.  The  torch  flared 
sufficiently  about  Miss  Upham's  board  —  save 
that  she  herself,  ancient  spinster,  pushed  it  in  dis 
may  from  her  top  of  the  table,  blew  upon  it  with 
vain  scared  sighs,  and  would  have  nothing  to  do 
with  a  matter  so  disturbing  to  the  right  tempera 
ture  of  her  plats.  We  others  passed  it  from  hand 
to  hand,  so  that  it  couldn't  go  quite  out  —  since 
I  must  in  fairness  add  that  the  element  of  the 
casual  and  the  more  generally  ironic,  the  play  of 
the  studious  or  the  irrepressibly  social  intelligence 
at  large,  couldn't  fail  to  insist  pretty  constantly 
on  its  rights.  There  were  quarters  as  well,  I 
should  note,  in  which  the  sense  of  local  colour 
proceeding  at  all  straight  from  the  source  I  have 
named  —  reflected,  that  is,  from  camp  and  field  — 
could  but  very  soon  run  short;  sharply  enough 
do  I  recall  for  instance  the  felt,  even  if  all  so 
privately  felt,  limits  of  my  poor  stream  of  con- 
tributive  remark  (despite  my  habit,  so  fondly 
practised  in  the  connection,  of  expatiating  in 
petto).  My  poor  stream  would  have  trickled, 
truly,  had  it  been  able  to  trickle  at  all,  from  the 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    309 

most  effective  of  my  few  occasions  of  "realising," 
up  to  that  time,  as  to  field  and  camp;  literally 
as  to  camp  in  fact,  since  the  occasion  had  con 
sisted  of  a  visit  paid,  or  a  pilgrimage,  rather,  ever 
so  piously,  so  tenderly  made,  one  August  afternoon 
of  the  summer  just  ended,  to  a  vast  gathering 
of  invalid  and  convalescent  troops,  under  canvas 
and  in  roughly  improvised  shanties,  at  some 
point  of  the  Rhode  Island  shore  that  figures  to 
my  memory,  though  with  a  certain  vagueness,  as 
Portsmouth  Grove.  (American  local  names  lend 
themselves  strangely  little  to  retention,  I  find, 
if  one  has  happened  to  deal  for  long  years  with 
almost  any  group  of  European  designations  — 
these  latter  springing,  as  it  has  almost  always 
come  to  seem,  straight  from  the  soil  where 
natural  causes  were  anciently  to  root  them,  each 
with  its  rare  identity.  The  bite  into  interest  of 
the  borrowed,  the  imposed,  the  "faked"  label, 
growing  but  as  by  a  dab  of  glue  on  an  article  of 
trade,  is  inevitably  much  less  sharp.)  Vagueness 
at  best  attends,  however,  the  queer  experience 
I  glance  at;  what  lives  of  it,  in  the  ineffaceable 
way,  being  again,  by  my  incurable  perversity, 
my  ambiguous  economy,  much  less  a  matter  of 
the  "facts  of  the  case,"  as  they  should,  even 
though  so  dead  and  buried  now,  revive  to  help 
me  through  an  anecdote,  than  the  prodigiously 
subjective  side  of  the  experience,  thanks  to 


310    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

which  it  still  presumes  to  flush  with  the  grand 
air  of  an  adventure.  If  I  had  not  already  so 
often  brazened  out  my  confession  of  the  far  from 
"showy"  in  the  terms  on  which  impressions 
could  become  indelibly  momentous  to  me  I  might 
blush  indeed  for  the  thin  tatter  dragged  in  thus 
as  an  affair  of  record.  It  consisted  at  the  time 
simply  of  an  emotion  —  though  the  emotion,  I 
should  add,  appeared  to  consist  of  everything 
in  the  whole  world  that  my  consciousness  could 
hold.  By  that  intensity  did  it  hang  as  bravely 
as  possible  together,  and  by  the  title  so  made 
good  has  it  handed  itself  endlessly  down. 

Owing  to  which  it  is  that  I  don't  at  all  know 
what  troops  were  in  question,  a  "mere"  couple 
of  Rhode  Island  regiments  (nothing  in  those 
days  could  be  too  big  to  escape  the  application 
of  the  "mere,")  or  a  congeries  of  the  temporarily 
incapacitated,  the  more  or  less  broken,  picked 
from  the  veterans  —  so  far  as  there  already  were 
such  —  of  the  East  at  large  and  directed  upon 
the  Grove  as  upon  a  place  of  stowage  and  sanita 
tion.  Discriminations  of  the  prosaic  order  had 
little  to  do  with  my  first  and  all  but  sole  vision 
of  the  American  soldier  in  his  multitude,  and 
above  all  —  for  that  was  markedly  the  colour  of 
the  whole  thing  —  in  his  depression,  his  wasted 
melancholy  almost;  an  effect  that  somehow 
corresponds  for  memory,  I  bethink  myself,  with 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    311 

the  tender  elegiac  tone  in  which  Walt  Whitman 
was  later  on  so  admirably  to  commemorate  him. 
The  restrictions  I  confess  to  are  abject,  but  both 
my  sense  and  my  aftersense  of  the  exhibition  I 
here  allude  to  had,  thanks  to  my  situation,  to 
do  all  the  work  they  could  in  the  way  of  repre 
sentation  to  me  of  what  was  most  publicly,  most 
heroically,  most  wastefully,  tragically,  terribly 
going  on.  It  had  so  to  serve  for  my  particular 
nearest  approach  to  a  "contact"  with  the 
active  drama  —  I  mean  of  course  the  collectively 
and  scenically  active,  since  the  brush  of  interest 
against  the  soldier  single  and  salient  was  an 
affair  of  every  day  —  that  were  it  not  for  just  one 
other  strange  spasm  of  awareness,  scarce  relaxed 
to  this  hour,  I  should  have  been  left  all  but 
pitifully  void  of  any  scrap  of  a  substitute  for  the 
concrete  experience.  The  long  hot  July  1st  of 
'63,  on  which  the  huge  battle  of  Gettysburg  had 
begun,  could  really  be  —  or  rather  couldn't  pos 
sibly  not  be  —  a  scrap  of  concrete  experience  for 
any  group  of  united  persons,  New  York  cousins 
and  all,  who,  in  a  Newport  garden,  restlessly 
strolling,  sitting,  neither  daring  quite  to  move 
nor  quite  to  rest,  quite  to  go  in  nor  quite  to  stay 
out,  actually  listened  together,  in  their  almost 
ignobly  safe  stillness,  as  to  the  boom  of  far-away 
guns.  This  was,  as  it  were,  the  War  —  the  War 
palpably  in  Pennsylvania;  not  less  than  my 


312    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

hour  of  a  felt  rage  of  repining  at  my  doomed 
absence  from  the  sight  of  that  march  of  the  54th 
Massachusetts  out  of  Boston,  "Bob"  Shaw  at 
its  head  and  our  exalted  Wilky  among  its  officers, 
of  which  a  great  sculptor  was,  on  the  spot  of 
their  vividest  passing,  to  set  the  image  aloft 
forever.  Poor  other  visitations,  comparatively, 
had  had  to  suffice  for  me;  I  could  take  in  fact 
for  amusing,  most  of  all  (since  that,  thank  good 
ness,  was  high  gaiety),  a  couple  of  impressions 
of  the  brief  preliminary  camp  life  at  Readville 
during  which  we  admired  the  charming  com 
position  of  the  44th  of  the  same  State,  under 
Colonel  Frank  Lee,  and  which  fairly  made 
romantic  for  me  Wilky 's  quick  spring  out  of 
mere  juvenility  and  into  such  brightly -bristling 
ranks.  He  had  begun  by  volunteering  in  a 
company  that  gave  him  half  the  ingenuous  youth 
of  the  circle  within  our  social  ken  for  brothers-in 
arms,  and  it  was  to  that  pair  of  Readville  after 
noons  I  must  have  owed  my  all  so  emphasised 
vision  of  handsome  young  Cabot  Russell,  who, 
again  to  be  his  closest  brother-in-arms  in  the 
54th,  irrecoverably  lost  himself,  as  we  have  seen, 
at  Fort  Wagner.  A  dry  desert,  one  must  suppose, 
the  life  in  which,  for  memory  and  appreciation 
made  one,  certain  single  hours  or  compressed 
groups  of  hours  have  found  their  reason  for 
standing  out  through  everything,  for  insistently 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    313 

living  on,  in  the  cabinet  of  intimate  reference, 
the  museum,  as  it  were,  of  the  soul's  curiosities  — 
where  doubtless  at  the  same  time  an  exhibition 
of  them  to  mere  other  eyes  or  ears  or  questioning 
logical  minds  may  effect  itself  in  no  plain  terms. 
We  recognise  such  occasions  more  and  more  as 
we  go  on,  and  are  surely,  as  a  general  thing,  glad 
when,  for  the  interest  of  memory  -  -  which  it's 
such  a  business  to  keep  interesting -- they  con 
stitute  something  of  a  cluster.  In  my  queer 
cluster,  at  any  rate,  that  flower  of  the  connection 
which  answers  to  the  name  of  Portsmouth 
Grove  still  overtops  other  members  of  its  class, 
so  that  to  finger  it  again  for  a  moment  is  to  make 
it  perceptibly  exhale  its  very  principle  of  life. 
This  was,  for  me,  at  the  time,  neither  more  nor 
less  than  that  the  American  soldier  in  his  multi 
tude  was  the  most  attaching  and  affecting  and 
withal  the  most  amusing  figure  of  romance 
conceivable;  the  great  sense  of  my  vision  being 
thus  that,  as  the  afternoon  light  of  the  place  and 
time  lingered  upon  him,  both  to  the  seeming 
enhancement  of  his  quality  and  of  its  own, 
romance  of  a  more  confused  kind  than  I  shall 
now  attempt  words  for  attended  his  every  move 
ment.  It  was  the  charmingest,  touchingest,  dread- 
fullest  thing  in  the  world  that  my  impression  of 
him  should  have  to  be  somehow  of  his  abandon 
ment  to  a  rueful  humour,  to  a  stoic  reserve  which 


314    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

could  yet  melt,  a  relation  with  him  once  estab 
lished,  into  a  rich  communicative  confidence; 
and,  in  particular,  all  over  the  place,  of  his  own 
scanted  and  more  or  less  baffled,  though  con 
stantly  and,  as  I  couldn't  not  have  it,  pathetically, 
"knowing"  devices. 

The  great  point  remained  for  me  at  all  events 
that  I  could  afterwards  appear  to  myself  to  have 
done  nothing  but  establish  with  him  a  relation, 
that  I  established  it,  to  my  imagination,  in  sev 
eral  cases  —  and  all  in  the  three  or  four  hours  - 
even  to  the  pitch  of  the  last  tenderness  of  friend 
ship.  I  recover  that,  strolling  about  with  honest 
and  so  superior  fellow-citizens,  or  sitting  with 
them  by  the  improvised  couches  of  their  languid 
rest,  I  drew  from  each  his  troubled  tale,  listened 
to  his  plaint  on  his  special  hard  case  —  taking 
form,  this,  in  what  seemed  to  me  the  very  poetry 
of  the  esoteric  vernacular  —  and  sealed  the  beau 
tiful  tie,  the  responsive  sympathy,  by  an  earnest 
offer,  in  no  instance  waved  away,  of  such  pecuni 
ary  solace  as  I  might  at  brief  notice  draw  on  my 
poor  pocket  for.  Yet  again,  as  I  indulge  this 
memory,  do  I  feel  that  I  might  if  pushed  a  little 
rejoice  in  having  to  such  an  extent  coincided 
with,  not  to  say  perhaps  positively  anticipated, 
dear  old  Walt  —  even  if  I  hadn't  come  armed 
like  him  with  oranges  and  peppermints.  I 
ministered  much  more  summarily,  though  pos- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    315 

sibly  in  proportion  to  the  time  and  thanks  to  my 
better  luck  more  pecuniarily;  but  I  like  to  treat 
myself  to  making  out  that  I  can  scarce  have 
brought  to  the  occasion  (in  proportion  to  the  time 
again  and  to  other  elements  of  the  case)  less  of 
the  consecrating  sentiment  than  he.  I  like 
further  to  put  it  in  a  light  that,  ever  so  curiously, 
if  the  good  Walt  was  most  inwardly  stirred  to 
his  later  commemorative  accents  by  his  partici 
pating  in  the  common  Americanism  of  his  hospital 
friends,  the  familiar  note  and  shared  sound  of 
which  formed  its  ground  of  appeal,  I  found 
myself  victim  to  a  like  moving  force  through 
quite  another  logic.  It  was  literally,  I  fear, 
because  our  common  Americanism  carried  with 
it,  to  my  imagination,  such  a  disclosed  freshness 
and  strangeness,  working,  as  I  might  say,  over 
such  gulfs  of  dissociation,  that  I  reached  across 
to  their,  these  hospital  friends',  side  of  the  matter, 
even  at  the  risk  of  an  imperilled  consistency. 
It  had  for  me,  the  state  in  question,  colour  and 
form,  accent  and  quality,  with  scarce  less 
"authority"  than  if  instead  of  the  rough  tracks 
or  worn  paths  of  my  casual  labyrinth  I  had  trod 
the  glazed  halls  of  some  school  of  natural  history. 
What  holds  me  now  indeed  is  that  such  an 
institution  might  have  exemplified  then  almost 
nothing  but  the  aspects  strictly  native  to  our 
social  and  seasonal  air;  so  simply  and  easily 


316     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

conceivable  to  the  kindly  mind  were  at  that  time 
these  reciprocities,  so  great  the  freedom  and 
pleasure  of  them  compared  with  the  restrictions 
imposed  on  directness  of  sympathy  by  the  awful 
admixtures  of  to-day,  those  which  offer  to  the 
would-be  participant  among  us,  on  returns  from 
sojourns  wherever  homogeneity  and  its  entailed 
fraternity,  its  easy  contacts,  still  may  be  seen 
to  work,  the  strange  shock  of  such  amenities 
declined  on  any  terms.  Really  not  possible  then, 
I  think,  the  perception  now  accompanying,  on 
American  ground,  this  shock  —  the  recognition, 
by  any  sensibility  at  all  reflective,  of  the  point 
where  our  national  theory  of  absorption,  assimila 
tion  and  conversion  appallingly  breaks  down; 
appallingly,  that  is,  for  those  to  whom  the 
consecrated  association,  of  the  sort  still  at  play 
where  community  has  not  been  blighted,  strongly 
speaks.  Which  remarks  may  reinforce  the  note  of 
my  unconsciousness  of  any  difficulty  for  knowing 
in  the  old,  the  comparatively  brothering,  condi 
tions  what  an  American  at  least  was.  Absurd 
thus,  no  doubt,  that  the  scant  experience  over 
which  I  perversely  linger  insists  on  figuring  to  me 
as  quite  a  revel  of  the  right  confidence. 

The  revel,  though  I  didn't  for  the  moment  yet 
know  it,  was  to  be  renewed  for  me  at  Cambridge 
with  less  of  a  romantic  intensity  perhaps,  but 
more  usefully,  so  to  put  it,  and  more  informingly; 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    317 

surrounded  as  I  presently  found  myself  at  the 
Law  School  with  young  types,  or  rather  with 
young  members  of  a  single  type,  not  one  of  whom 
but  would  have  enriched  my  imagined  hall  of 
congruous  specimens.  That,  with  the  many 
months  of  it,  was  to  be  the  real  disclosure,  the 
larger  revelation;  that  was  to  be  the  fresh 
picture  for  a  young  person  reaching  the  age  of 
twenty  in  wellnigh  grotesque  unawareness  of  the 
properties  of  the  atmosphere  in  which  he  but 
wanted  to  claim  that  he  had  been  nourished.  Of 
what  I  mean  by  this  I  shall  in  a  moment  have 
more  to  say  —  after  pointing  a  trifle  more,  for  our 
patience,  the  sense  of  my  dilatation  upon  Ports 
mouth  Grove.  Perfectly  distinct  has  remained 
the  sail  back  to  Newport  by  that  evening's 
steamboat;  the  mere  memory  of  which  indeed 
—  and  I  recall  that  I  felt  it  inordinately  long  - 
must  have  been  for  me,  just  above,  the  spring  of 
the  whole  reference.  The  sail  was  long,  measured 
by  my  acute  consciousness  of  paying  physically 
for  my  excursion  —  which  hadn't  answered  the 
least  little  bit  for  my  impaired  state.  This  last 
disobliging  fact  became  one,  at  the  same  time, 
with  an  intensity,  indeed  a  strange  rapture,  of 
reflection,  which  I  may  not  in  the  least  pretend 
to  offer  as  a  clear  or  coherent  or  logical  thing,  and 
of  which  I  can  only  say,  leaving  myself  there 
through  the  summer  twilight,  in  too  scant  rest 


318    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

on  a  deck  stool  and  against  the  bulwark,  that  it 
somehow  crowned  my  little  adventure  of  sym 
pathy  and  wonder  with  a  shining  round  of 
resignation  —  a  realisation,  as  we  nowadays  put 
it,  that,  measuring  wounds  against  wounds,  or 
the  compromised,  the  particular  taxed  condition, 
at  the  least,  against  all  the  rest  of  the  debt  then 
so  generally  and  enormously  due,  one  was  no 
less  exaltedly  than  wastefully  engaged  in  the 
common  fact  of  endurance.  There  are  memories 
in  truth  too  fine  or  too  peculiar  for  notation,  too 
intensely  individual  and  supersubtle  —  call  them 
what  one  will;  yet  which  one  may  thus  no  more 
give  up  confusedly  than  one  may  insist  on  them 
vainly.  Their  kind  is  nothing  ever  to  a  present 
purpose  unless  they  are  in  a  manner  statable, 
but  is  at  the  same  time  ruefully  aware  of 
threatened  ridicule  if  they  are  overstated.  Not 
that  I  in  the  least  mind  such  a  menace,  however, 
in  just  adding  that,  soothed  as  I  have  called 
the  admirable  ache  of  my  afternoon  with  that 
inward  interpretation  of  it,  I  felt  the  latter  —  or 
rather  doubtless  simply  the  entire  affair  —  abso 
lutely  overarched  by  the  majestic  manner  in 
which  the  distress  of  our  return  drew  out  into 
the  lucid  charm  of  the  night.  To  which  I  must 
further  add  that  the  hour  seemed,  by  some 
wondrous  secret,  to  know  itself  marked  and 
charged  and  unforgettable  —  hinting  so  in  its 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    319 

very  own  terms  of  cool  beauty  at  something- 
portentous  in  it,  an  exquisite  claim  then  and 
there  for  lasting  value  and  high  authority. 


X 

AL  of  which  foregoing  makes,  I  grant,  a  long 
parenthesis  in  my  recovery  of  the  more  im 
mediate  Cambridge  impressions.  I  have 
left  them  awaiting  me,  yet  I  am  happy  to  say 
not  sensibly  the  worse  for  it,  in  their  cluster  round 
about  Miss  Upham  and  her  board  of  beneficiary 
images;  which  latter  start  up  afresh  and  with  the 
softest  submission  to  any  convenient  neglect  - 
that  ineffably  touching  and  confessed  dependence 
of  such  apparitions  on  one's  "pleasure,"  save  the 
mark!  for  the  flicker  of  restorative  light.  The 
image  most  vividly  restored  is  doubtless  that  of 
Professor  F.  J.  Child,  head  of  the  "English 
Department"  at  Harvard  and  master  of  that 
great  modern  science  of  folk-lore  to  his  accom 
plishment  in  which  his  vast  and  slowly-published 
collection  of  the  Ballad  literature  of  our  lan 
guage  is  a  recognised  monument;  delightful  man, 
rounded  character,  passionate  patriot,  admirable 
talker,  above  all  thorough  humanist  and  humorist. 
He  was  the  genial  autocrat  of  that  breakfast-table 
not  only,  but  of  our  symposia  otherwise  timed, 
and  as  he  comes  back  to  me  with  the  fresh  and 
quite  circular  countenance  of  the  time  before  the 
personal  cares  and  complications  of  life  had 

320 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    321 

gravely  thickened  for  him,  his  aspect  all  finely 
circular,  with  its  close  rings  of  the  fairest  hair, 
its  golden  rims  of  the  largest  glasses,  its  finished 
rotundity  of  figure  and  attitude,  I  see  that  there 
was  the  American  spirit  —  since  I  was  "after" 
it  —  of  a  quality  deeply  inbred,  beautifully  ad 
justed  to  all  extensions  of  knowledge  and  taste 
and,  as  seemed  to  me,  quite  sublimely  quickened 
by  everything  that  was  at  the  time  so  tremen 
dously  in  question.  That  vision  of  him  was  never 
afterwards  to  yield  to  other  lights  —  though  these, 
even  had  occasion  for  them  been  more  frequent 
with  me,  couldn't  much  have  interfered  with  it; 
so  that  what  I  still  most  retain  of  him  is  the  very 
flush  and  mobility,  the  living  expansion  and 
contraction,  the  bright  comedy  and  almost  lunar 
eclipse,  of  his  cherubic  face  according  as  things 
appeared  to  be  going  for  the  country.  I  was 
always  just  across  from  him,  as  my  brother, 
beside  whom  I  took  my  place,  had  been,  and  I 
remember  well  how  vivid  a  clock-face  it  became 
to  me;  I  found  still,  as  in  my  younger  time, 
matter  enough  everywhere  for  gaping,  but  greatest 
of  all,  I  think,  while  that  tense  season  lasted,  was 
my  wonder  for  the  signs  and  portents,  the  quips 
and  cranks,  the  wreathed  smiles,  or  otherwise 
the  candid  obscurations,  of  our  prime  talker's 
presented  visage.  I  set,  as  it  were,  the  small 
tick  of  my  own  poor  watch  by  it  —  which  private 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

register  would  thump  or  intermit  in  agreement 
with  these  indications.  I  recover  it  that,  thanks 
to  the  perpetual  play  of  his  sympathy  and  irony, 
confidence  and  scorn,  as  well  as  to  that  of  my 
own  less  certainly  directed  sensibility,  he  struck 
me  on  the  bad  days,  which  were  then  so  many, 
as  fairly  august,  cherubism  and  all,  for  sincerity 
of  association  with  every  light  and  shade,  every 
ebb  and  flow,  of  our  Cause.  Where  he  most 
shone  out,  indeed,  so  that  depression  then  wasn't 
a  gloom  in  him  but  a  darting  flame,  was  in  the 
icy  air  of  the  attitude  of  the  nations  to  us,  that 
of  the  couple,  the  most  potent,  across  the  sea, 
with  which  we  were  especially  concerned  and 
which,  as  during  the  whole  earlier  half  of  the 
War  and  still  longer  it  more  and  more  defined 
itself,  drew  from  him  at  once  all  the  drolleries 
and  all  the  asperities  of  his  sarcasm.  Nothing 
more  particularly  touched  me  in  him,  I  make 
out  —  for  it  lingers  in  a  light  of  its  own  —  than  the 
fashion  after  which  he  struck  me  as  a  fond  grave 
guardian,  not  so  much  of  the  memory  and  the 
ashes  yet  awhile,  as  of  the  promise,  in  all  its 
flower,  of  the  sacrificial  young  men  whom  the 
University  connection  had  passed  through  his 
hands  and  whom  he  looked  out  for  with  a  tender 
ness  of  interest,  a  nursing  pride,  that  was  as 
contagious  as  I  could  possibly  have  wished  it. 
I  didn't  myself  know  the  young  men,  save  three 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    323 

or  four,  and  could  only,  at  our  distance,  hold  my 
tongue  and  do  them  homage;  never  afterwards 
(as  I  even  then  foreknew  would  be  the  case) 
missing,  when  I  could  help  it,  or  failing  to  pick 
up,  a  single  brush,  a  scattered  leaf,  of  their  grow 
ing  or  their  riper  legend.  Certain  of  them  whom 
I  had  neither  seen  nor,  as  they  fell  in  battle,  was 
destined  ever  to  see,  have  lived  for  me  since  just 
as  communicated  images,  figures  created  by  his 
tone  about  them  —  which,  I  admit,  mightn't  or 
needn't  have  mattered  to  me  for  all  the  years, 
yet  which  couldn't  help  so  doing  from  the  moment 
the  right  touch  had  handed  them  over  to  my 
restless  claim. 

It  was  not  meanwhile  for  want  of  other  figures 
that  these  were  gathered  in,  for  I  have  again  to 
grant  that  in  those  days  figures  became  such  for 
me  on  easy  terms,  and  that  in  particular  William 
had  only  to  let  the  light  of  his  attention,  his 
interest,  his  curiosity,  his  aversion  even  (could 
he  indeed  have  passingly  lived  in  the  helplessness 
of  mere  aversion)  visibly  rest  on  them  for  me 
entirely  to  feel  that  they  must  count  for  as  much 
as  might  be  —  so  far  at  least  as  my  perception  was 
concerned,  contact  being  truly  another  affair. 
That  was  the  truth  at  that  season,  if  it  wasn't 
always  to  remain  the  truth;  I  felt  his  interpre 
tations,  his  personal  allowances,  so  largely  and 
inveterately  liberal,  always  impose  themselves:  it 


324     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

was  not  till  ever  so  much  later,  and  then  only 
little  by  little,  that  I  came  to  accept  the  strange 
circumstance  of  my  not  invariably  "liking,"  in 
homely  parlance,  his  people,  and  his  not  invari 
ably  liking  mine.  The  process  represented  by 
that  word  was  for  each  of  us,  I  think,  a  process  so 
involved  with  other  operations  of  the  spirit,  so 
beautifully  complicated  and  deformed  by  them, 
that  our  results  in  this  sort  doubtless  eventually 
lost  themselves  in  the  labyrinth  of  our  reasons; 
which  latter,  eventually  —  the  labyrinth,  I  mean  - 
could  be  a  frequent  and  not  other  than  animated 
meeting-place  in  spite  of  the  play  of  divergence. 
The  true  case,  I  all  the  while  plentifully  felt,  and 
still  more  feel  now,  was  that  /  diverged  and  my 
brother  almost  never;  in  the  sense,  that  is,  that 
no  man  can  well  have  cared  less  for  the  question, 
or  made  less  of  the  consciousness,  of  dislike  - 
have  valued  less  their  developments  and  comforts. 
Even  the  opposite  of  that  complacency  scarce 
seemed  a  recognised,  or  at  least  in  any  degree  a 
cultivated,  state  with  him;  his  passion,  and  that 
a  passion  of  the  intelligence,  was  justice  unafraid 
-  and  this,  as  it  were,  almost  unformulatedly, 
altogether  unpedantically :  it  simply  made  him 
utterly  not  "mind"  numberless  things  that 
with  most  people  serve  as  dim  lights,  warnings 
or  attractions,  in  the  grope  of  appreciation  or 
the  adventure  of  instinct.  His  luminous  in- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    325 

difference  kept  his  course  thus,  as  I  was  later  to 
recognise,  extraordinarily  straight  —  to  the  in 
crease,  as  I  have  noted,  of  my  own  poor  sense  of 
weakly  straggling,  unaccompanied  as  this  at  the 
same  time  was  by  the  least  envy  of  such  a  defi 
ciency  in  what  is  roughly  called  prejudice,  and 
what  I,  to  save  my  face,  in  my  ups  and  downs 
of  sociability  or  curiosity,  could  perhaps  have 
found  no  better  term  for  than  the  play  of  taste 
as  taste.  Wonderful,  and  to  me  in  the  last 
resort  admirable,  was  William's  fine  heritage  and 
awareness  of  that  principle  without  its  yet 
affecting  him  on  the  human,  the  more  largely 
social,  just  the  conversable  and  workable  ground 
-  in  presence  of  some  other  principle  that  might 
do  so,  whether  this  validly  or  but  speciously 
interfered.  The  triumph  over  cKstaste,  in  one's 
relations,  one's  exposures,  one's  judgments,  that 
I  could  understand  as  high  virtue,  strained  hero 
ism,  the  ideal  groaningly  applied;  but  what  left 
me  always  impressed,  to  put  it  mildly,  was  the 
fact  that  in  my  brother's  case  the  incorrupti 
bility  of  his  candour  would  have  had  to  be 
explained  to  him,  and  with  scant  presumption 
too  of  his  taking  it  in  or  having  patience  while 
one  spoke.  Such  an  enterprise,  I  was  well  aware, 
would  at  any  rate  have  left  me  a  sorry  enough 
figure  afterwards.  What  one  would  have  had  to 
be,  what  one  could  in  the  least  decently  be,  except 


326     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

candid  without  alternative  —  this,  with  other  like 
matters,  I  should  have  had  to  be  prepared  to  set 
forth;  and,  more  and  more  addressed  as  I  eventu 
ally  found  myself  to  a  cultivation  of  the  absolute 
in  taste  as  taste,  to  repeat  my  expression,  I  was 
far  from  the  wish  to  contend  for  it  as  against 
any  appearance  whatever  of  a  better  way.  Such 
was  part  of  the  experience,  or  call  it  even  the 
discipline,  of  association  with  a  genius  so  marked 
for  the  process  known  as  giving  the  benefit  of  the 
doubt  —  and  giving  it  (for  that  was  the  irritating 
charm),  not  in  smug  charity  or  for  a  pointed 
moral,  but  through  the  very  nature  of  a  mind 
incapable  of  the  shut  door  in  any  direction  and  of 
a  habit  of  hospitality  so  free  that  it  might  again 
and  again  have  been  observed,  in  contact  and 
intercourse,  to  supply  weaker  and  less  graced 
vessels  with  the  very  means  of  bringing  in 
response,  often  absolutely  in  retort.  This  last  of 
course  was  not  so  much  the  benefit  of  the  doubt 
as  the  displayed  unconsciousness  of  any  doubt, 
a  perpetual  aid  rendered  the  doubtful,  especially 
when  incarnate  in  persons,  to  be  more  right  or 
more  true,  more  clever  or  more  charming  or 
whatever,  than  mere  grudging  love  of  "form," 
standing  by,  could  at  all  see  it  entitled  to  become. 
Anything  like  William's  unawareness  of  exertion 
after  having  helped  the  lame  dog  of  converse 
over  stile  after  stile  I  have  in  no  other  case  met. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    327 

Together  with  which,  however,  I  may  not  forbear 
to  add,  the  very  occasional  and  comparatively 
small  flare  in  him  of  some  blest  perversity  of 
prejudice  that  one  might  enjoy  on  one's  own  side 
the  vulgar  luxury  of  naming  as  such  was  a  thing 
which,  conformably  to  that  elation,  one  reached 
out  for  as  one  might  for  the  white  glint  of  the 
rare  edelweiss  on  some  high  Alpine  ledge. 

If  these  remarks  illustrate  in  their  number 
the  inevitable  bent  of  the  remark  to  multiply 
within  me  as  an  effect  of  fraternal  evocation  I 
thereby  but  stick  the  more  to  my  subject,  or  in 
other  words  to  the  much-peopled  scene,  as  I 
found  it;  which  I  should  scarce  have  found 
without  him.  Peopled  as  it  was  with  his  people, 
which  they  at  first  struck  me  as  markedly  being, 
it  led  me  then  to  take  the  company,  apart  from 
F.  J.  Child,  for  whatever  he  all  vividly  and 
possessively  pronounced  it;  I  having  for  a  long 
time  but  the  scantest  company  of  my  own,  even 
at  the  Law  School,  where  my  fellow-disciples 
could  bear  the  name  for  me  only  as  a  troop  of 
actors  might  have  done  on  that  further  side  of 
footlights  to  which  I  never  went  round.  This 
last  at  least  with  few  exceptions,  while  there  were 
none  to  the  exquisite  rule,  as  I  positively  to-day 
feel  it,  of  my  apprehension  of  William's  cluster 
as  a  concern  of  his  —  interesting  exactly  because 
of  that  reference.  Any  concern  of  his  was  thus 


328     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

a  thing  already  charged  with  life,  his  life  over 
and  above  its  own,  if  it  happened  by  grace  to 
have  any  comparable;  which,  as  I  pick  out  the 
elements  again  from  the  savoury  TJpham  shades, 
could  indeed  be  claimed  for  several  of  these.  I 
pick  out  the  ardent  and  delicate  and  firm  John 
May,  son,  as  he  comes  back  to  me,  of  a  distin 
guished  Abolitionist  of  New  York  State  —  rare 
bird;  and  seen  by  that  fact  in  a  sort  of  glamour 
of  picturesque  justification,  an  air  deriving  colour 
from  the  pre-established  gallantry,  yet  the  quiet 
and  gentlemanly  triumph,  of  his  attitude.  So 
at  least  do  I  read  back  into  blurred  visions  the 
richest  meanings  they  could  have.  I  pick  out 
for  a  not  less  baffled  tribute  a  particular  friend  of 
my  brother's  and  a  comrade  of  May's,  whom  I 
identify  on  the  superficial  side  but  by  his  name  of 
Salter  and  the  fact  of  his  studentship  in  theology; 
which  pursuit,  it  comes  over  me  as  I  write,  he 
must  have  shared,  of  homely,  almost  of  sickly, 
New  England  type  as  he  was,  with  May  of  the 
fine  features,  the  handsome  smile,  by  my  resolute 
recollection,  the  developed  moustache  and  short 
dark  pointed  beard,  the  property  of  vaguely 
recalling  in  fine  some  old  portrait  supposedly 
Spanish  (supposedly,  and  perhaps  to  a  fantastic 
tune,  by  me  —  for  I  dare  say  it  was  by  no  one 
else) .  Salter  had  no  such  references  —  it  even 
appalled  me  to  have  a  bit  intelligently  to  imagine 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    329 

to  what  origins  starved  of  amenity  or  colour  his 
aspect  and  air,  the  slope  of  his  shoulders,  the 
mode  of  growth  of  his  hair,  the  relation  of  his 
clothes  to  his  person  and  the  relation  of  his 
person  to  the  inevitable  needs  of  intercourse, 
might  refer  him;  but  there  played  about  him  a 
bright  force  in  the  highest  and  extraordinarily 
quick  flares  of  which  one  felt  nothing,  while  the 
exhibition  lasted,  but  his  intellectual  elegance. 
He  had  the  distinction  of  wit  —  so  rare,  we  ever 
feel  it  to  be,  when  we  see  it  beautifully  act;  and 
I  remember  well  how,  as  that  was  indeed  for  me 
almost  the  whole  of  intellectual  elegance,  I  fell 
back  on  the  idea  that  such  an  odd  assortment 
of  marks  in  him  was  at  least  picturesque,  or  much 
in  the  Maison  Vauquer  line:  pinched  as  I  must 
have  been  by  the  question  of  whether  a  person 
of  that  type  and  cut  had  the  "right"  to  be 
witty.  On  what  else  but  the  power  the  right 
rested  I  couldn't  doubtless  have  said;  I  but 
recall  my  sense  that  wit  was  somehow  the  finest 
of  all  social  matters  and  that  it  seemed  impossible 
to  be  less  connected  with  such  than  this  product 
of  New  England  at  its  sparest  and  dryest;  which 
fact  was  a  sort  of  bad  mark  for  the  higher  civilisa 
tion.  I  was  prepared  to  recognise  that  you 
might  be  witty  and  ugly,  ugly  with  the  highest 
finish  of  ugliness  —  hadn't  the  celebrated  Voltaire 
been  one  of  the  scrappiest  of  men  as  well  as  of 


330    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

the  most  immortally  quo  ted? --but  it  cost  a 
wrench  to  have  to  take  it  that  you  could  shine 
to  admiration  out  of  such  a  platitude  of  the 
mere  "plain."  It  was  William  in  especial  who 
guaranteed  to  me  Salter's  superior  gift,  of  which 
in  the  free  commerce  of  Divinity  Hall  he  had 
frequent  illustration  —  so  that  what  I  really  most 
apprehended,  I  think,  was  the  circumstance  of 
his  apprehending:  this  too  with  a  much  finer 
intellectual  need  and  competence  than  mine, 
after  all,  and  in  the  course  of  debates  and  dis 
cussions,  ardent  young  symposia  of  the  spirit, 
which  struck  me  as  falling  in  with  all  I  had  ever 
curiously  conceived  of  those  hours  that  foster  the 
generous  youth  of  minds  preappointed  to  great 
ness.  There  was  the  note  of  the  effective  quaint 
on  which  I  could  put  my  finger:  catch  a  poor 
student  only  dreary  enough  and  then  light  in  him 
the  flame  of  irony  at  its  intensest,  the  range  of 
question  and  the  command  of  figure  at  their 
bravest,  and  one  might,  with  one's  appetite  for 
character,  feed  on  the  bold  antithesis.  I  had 
only  to  like  for  my  brother,  and  verily  almost 
with  pride,  his  assured  experience  of  any  queer 
concretion  —  his  experience  of  abstractions  I  was 
to  rise  to  much  more  feebly  and  belatedly,  scarce 
more  indeed  ever  than  most  imperfectly  --to  find 
the  very  scene  of  action,  or  at  least  of  passion, 
enjoyed  by  these  my  elders  and  betters,  enriched 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    331 

and  toned  and  consecrated  after  the  fashion  of 
places  referred  to  in  literature  and  legend. 

I  thus  live  back  of  a  sudden  —  for  I  insist  on 
just  yielding  to  it  —  into  the  odd  hours  when  the 
poor  little  old  Divinity  Hall  of  the  overgrown 
present  faced  me  as  through  the  haze  of  all  the 
past  Indian  summers  it  had  opened  its  brood 
ing  study-windows  to;  when  the  "avenue"  of 
approach  to  it  from  the  outer  world  was  a  thing 
of  dignity,  a  positive  vista  in  a  composition; 
when  the  Norton  woods,  near  by,  massed  them 
selves  in  scarlet  and  orange,  and  when  to  pene 
trate  and  mount  a  stair  and  knock  at  a  door  and, 
enjoying  response,  then  sink  into  a  window-bench 
and  inhale  at  once  the  vague  golden  November 
and  the  thick  suggestion  of  the  room  where 
nascent  "thought"  had  again  and  again  piped 
or  wailed,  was  to  taste  as  I  had  never  done  before 
the  poetry  of  the  prime  initiation  and  of  associ 
ated  growth.  With  cards  of  such  pale  pasteboard 
could  the  trick,  to  my  vision,  play  itself  —  by 
which  I  mean  that  I  admire  under  this  memory 
the  constant  "dodges"  of  an  imagination  reduced 
to  such  straits  for  picking  up  a  living.  It  was  as 
if  one's  sense  of  "Europe,"  sufficiently  sure  of 
itself  to  risk  the  strategic  retreat,  had  backed 
away  on  tiptoe  just  to  see  how  the  sense  of  what 
was  there  facing  one  would  manage  without  it  — 
manage  for  luxury,  that  is,  with  the  mere  in- 


332    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

dispensable  doubtless  otherwise  provided  for. 
That  the  sense  in  question  did  manage  beautifully, 
when  at  last  so  hard  pressed,  and  that  the  plas 
ticity  and  variety  of  my  vision  draw  from  me 
now  this  murmur  of  elation,  are  truths  constitut 
ing  together  for  me  the  perhaps  even  overloaded 
moral  of  my  tale.  With  which  I  scarce  need 
note  that  so  elastic  a  fancy,  so  perverse  a  little 
passion  for  finding  good  in  everything  —  good 
for  what  I  thought  of  as  history,  which  was 
the  consideration  of  life,  while  the  given  thing, 
whatever  it  was,  had  only  to  be  before  me  —  was 
inevitably  to  work  a  storage  of  other  material 
for  memory  close-packed  enough  to  make  such 
disengagement  as  I  thus  attempt  at  the  end  of 
time  almost  an  act  of  violence.  I  couldn't  do 
without  the  scene,  as  I  have  elsewhere  had 
occasion  to  hint,  whether  actually  or  but  possibly 
peopled  (the  people  always  calling  for  the  back 
ground  and  the  background  insisting  on  the 
people);  and  thanks  to  this  harmless  extrava 
gance,  or  thanks  in  other  words  to  the  visionary 
liberties  I  constantly  took  (so  that  the  plate  of 
sense  was  at  the  time  I  speak  of  more  overscored 
and  figured  for  me  than  sense  was  in  the  least 
practically  required  to  have  it),  my  path  is  even 
now  beset  to  inconvenience  with  the  personal 
image  unextinct.  It  presents  itself,  I  feel,  beyond 
reason,  and  yet  if  I  turn  from  it  the  ease  is  less, 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    333 

and  I  am  divided  when  I  further  press  the  spring 
between  compunction  at  not  pausing  before 
some  shade  that  seems  individually  and  even 
hopefully  to  wait,  and  the  fear  of  its  feeling  after 
all  scanted  of  service  should  I  name  it  only  to 
leave  it.  I  name  for  instance,  just  to  hover  a 
little,  silent  Vanderpool,  the  mutest  presence  at 
the  Upham  board,  and  quite  with  no  sense  of  the 
invidious  in  so  doing.  He  was  save  for  myself, 
by  my  remembrance,  the  only  member  of  the 
Law  School  there  present;  I  see  him  moreover  "' 
altogether  remarkably,  just  incorruptibly  and 
exquisitely  dumb,  though  with  a  "gentlemanly" 
presence,  a  quasi-conservative  New  Jersey  finish 
(so  delicate  those  dim  discriminations!)  that 
would  have  seemed  naturally  to  go  with  a  certain 
forensic  assurance.  He  looked  so  as  if  he  came 
from  "good  people"  —  which  was  no  very  common 
appearance  on  the  Harvard  scene  of  those  days, 
as  indeed  it  is  to  a  positive  degree  no  so  very 
common  appearance  on  any  scene  at  any  time: 
it  was  a  note  of  aspect  which  one  in  any  case 
found  one's  self,  to  whatever  vague  tune,  apt 
quite  to  treasure  or  save  up.  So  it  was  impossible 
not  to  recognise  in  our  soundless  commensal  the 
very  finest  flower  of  shyness,  the  very  richest 
shade  of  the  deprecating  blush,  that  one  had 
perhaps  ever  encountered;  one  ended  in  fact 
by  fairly  hanging  on  the  question  of  whether  the 


334    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

perfection  of  his  modesty  —  for  it  was  all  a  true 
welter  of  modesty,  not  a  grain  of  it  anything 
stiffer  —  would  beautifully  hold  out  or  would 
give  way  to  comparatively  brute  pressure  from 
some  point  of  our  circle.  I  longed  to  bet  on  him, 
to  see  him  through  without  a  lapse;  and  this 
in  fact  was  so  thoroughly  reserved  to  me  that  my 
eventual  relief  and  homage  doubtless  account  for 
the  blest  roundness  of  my  impression.  He  had 
so  much  "for"  him,  was  tall  and  fine,  equipped 
and  appointed,  born,  quite  to  an  effect  of  ulti 
mately  basking,  in  the  light  of  the  Law,  ac 
quainted,  one  couldn't  fail  of  seeing,  with  a 
tradition  of  manners,  not  to  mention  that  of  the 
forensic  as  aforesaid,  and  not  to  name  either  the 
use  of  "means,"  equally  imputable:  how  rare 
accordingly  would  be  the  quality,  letting  even 
the  quantity  alone,  of  his  inhibitions,  and  how 
interesting  in  the  event  the  fact  that  he  was 
absolutely  never  to  have  deviated!  He  dis 
appeared  without  having  spoken,  and  yet  why 
should  I  now  be  noting  it  if  he  hadn't  neverthe 
less  admirably  expressed  himself?  What  this  con 
sisted  of  was  that  there  was  scarce  anything  he 
wouldn't  have  done  for  us  had  it  been  possible, 
and  I  think,  in  view  of  the  distinctness  with 
which  he  still  faces  me,  the  tenderness  with  which 
he  inspires  my  muse  and  the  assurance  with 
which  I  have  "gone  into"  him,  that  I  can  never 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    335 

in  all  my  life  since  have  seen  so  precious  a  message 
delivered  under  such  difficulties.  Admirable,  in 
effaceable,  because  so  essentially  all  decipherable, 
Vanderpool ! 

It  wasn't  either  that  John  Bancroft  tossed 
the  ball  of  talk  —  which  but  for  the  presence  of 
the  supremely  retentive  agent  just  commemo 
rated  would  have  appeared  on  occasion  to  remain 
in  his  keeping  by  a  preference,  on  its  own  part, 
not  to  be  outwitted;  this  more  or  less  at  all 
times  too,  but  especially  during  the  first  weeks 
of  his  dawning  on  us  straight  out  of  Germany 
and  France,  flushed  with  the  alarm,  as  one 
might  have  read  it,  of  having  to  justify  rare 
opportunities  and  account  for  the  time  he  had 
inordinately,  obscurely,  or  at  least  not  a  little 
mysteriously,  spent  —  the  implication  of  every 
inch  of  him  being  that  he  had  spent  it  seriously. 
Odd  enough  it  certainly  was  that  we  should  have 
been  appointed  to  unveil,  so  far  as  we  might,  a 
pair  of  such  marked  monuments  to  modesty, 
marble  statues,  as  they  might  have  been,  on 
either  side  of  the  portal  of  talk;  what  I  at  any 
rate  preserve  of  my  immediate  vision  of  Bancroft 

-whose  very  promptest  identity  indeed  had 
been  his  sonship  to  the  eminent  historian  of  our 
country  and  earlier  and  later  diplomatist  —  was 
an  opposition,  trying  to  me  rather  than  engaging 
as  its  like  had  been  in  the  composition  of  Vander- 


336    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

pool,  between  what  we  somehow  wanted  from 
him  (or  what  I  at  least  did)  and  what  we  too 
scantly  gathered.  This  excellent  friend,  as  he 
was  later  on  to  become,  with  his  handsome  high 
head,  large  colourable  brow  and  eyes  widely 
divided  —  brave  contribution  ever  to  a  fine  coun 
tenance  —  sat  there  in  a  sort  of  glory  of  experience 
which,  had  he  been  capable  of  anything  so  akin 
to  a  demonstration,  he  would  have  appeared  all 
unsociably  to  repudiate.  It  was  bruited  of  him 
that,  like  John  La  Farge,  whose  friend  he  was 
admiringly  to  become  —  for  he  too  had  a  Newport 
connection  —  he  "painted,"  that  is  persisted 
(which  was  the  wondrous  thing!)  in  painting; 
and  that  this  practice  had  grown  upon  him  in 
France,  where,  en  province,  his  brother  had 
entirely  taken  root  and  where  the  whole  art-life, 
as  well  as  the  rural  life,  of  the  country  had  been 
opened  to  him;  besides  its  a  little  later  coming 
to  light  that  he  had  romantically  practised  at 
Dusseldorf,  where  too  he  had  personally  known 
and  tremendously  liked  George  du  Maurier, 
whose  first  so  distinguished  appearances  as  an 
illustrator  had  already  engaged  our  fondest  atten 
tion  —  were  they  most  dawningly  in  the  early 
Cornhill,  or  in  Punch,  or  in  Once  a  Week?  They 
glimmer  upon  me,  darkly  and  richly,  as  from  the 
pages  of  the  last  named.  Not  to  be  rendered, 
I  may  again  parenthesise,  our  little  thrilled 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    337 

awareness,    William's    and    mine,    though    mine 
indeed   but   panting   after   his,    of   such   peeping 
phenomena  of  the  European  day  as  the  outbreak 
of  a  "new  man"  upon  our  yearning  view  of  the 
field  of  letters  and  of  the  arts.     I  am  moved  to 
wonder  at  how  we  came  by  it,  shifting  all  for 
ourselves,  and  with  the  parental  flair,  so  far  as 
the   sensibility   of   home   was   concerned,   turned 
but  to  directions  of  its  own  and  much  less  restless 
on  the  whole  than  ours.     More  touching  to  me 
now  than  I  can  say,  at  all  events,  this  recapture 
of  the  hour  at  which  Du  Maurier,  consecrated  to 
much  later,  to  then  still  far-off  intimate  affection, 
became  the  new  man  so  significantly  as  to  make 
a  great  importance  of  John  Bancroft's  news  of 
him,  which  already  bore,  among  many  marvels, 
upon  the  supreme  wonder  of  his  working,  as  he 
was  all  his  life  bravely  to  work,  under  impaired 
and  gravely  menaced  eyesight.     When  I  speak, 
as  just  above,  of  what,  through  so  many  veils, 
"came  to  light,"  I  should  further  add,  I  use  a 
figure  representing  a  considerable  lapse  of  time 
and   shading   off,   for   full   evocation,   into   more 
associations    than    I    can    here    make   place    for. 
Nothing  in  this  connection  came  soon  to  light  at 
least  but  that  endless   amazement  might  lie  in 
the  strange  facts  of  difference  between  our  com 
panion  and  his  distinguished  sire  —  the  latter  so 
supremely,  so  quaintly  yet  so  brilliantly,  social  a 


338    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

figure,  I  apprehended,  when  gaped  at,  a  still 
more  angular,  but  more  polished  and  pacific  Don 
Quixote,  on  the  sleekest  of  Rosinantes,  with 
white-tipped  chin  protrusive,  with  high  sharp 
elbows  raised  and  long  straight  legs  beautifully 
pointed,  all  after  the  gallantest  fashion,  against 
the  clear  sunset  sky  of  old  Newport  cavalcades. 
Mr.  Bancroft  the  elder,  the  "great,"  was  a 
comfort,  that  is  a  fine  high  identity,  a  cluster  of 
strong  accents,  the  sort  of  thing  one's  vision 
followed,  in  the  light  of  history,  if  not  of  mere 
misguided  fancy,  for  illustration  of  conceived 
type  —  type,  say  in  this  case,  of  superior  person 
of  the  ancient  and  the  more  or  less  alien  public 
order,  the  world  of  affairs  transacted  at  courts 
and  chancelleries,  in  which  renown,  one  had  gath 
ered  from  the  perusal  of  memoirs,  allowed  for 
much  development  of  detail  and  much  incision  of 
outline,  when  not  even  directly  resting  on  them. 
As  it  had  been  a  positive  bliss  to  me  that  words 
and  names  might  prove  in  extremity  sources  of 
support,  so  it  comes  back  to  me  that  I  had  drawn 
mystic  strength  from  just  obscurely  sighing 
"Metternich!"  or  "Talleyrand!"  as  Mr.  Ban 
croft  bounced  by  me  —  so  far  as  a  pair  of  widely- 
opened  compasses  might  bounce  —  in  the  August 
gloaming.  The  value  of  which,  for  reflection, 
moreover,  was  not  in  the  least  in  its  being  that 
if  his  son  remained  so  long  pleadingly  inscrutable 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    339 

any  derived  Metternich  suggestion  had  contrib 
uted  to  keep  him  so  —  for  quite  there  was  the 
curiosity  of  the  case,  that  among  the  imputations 
John  appeared  most  to  repudiate  was  that  of 
having  at  any  moment  breathed  the  air  either 
of  records  or  of  protocols.  If  he  persisted  in 
painting  for  years  after  his  return  to  America 
without,  as  the  legend  grew,  the  smallest  dis 
closure  of  his  work  or  confession  of  his  progress 
to  human  eye  or  ear,  he  drew  the  rigour  of  this 
course  wholly  from  his  singleness  of  nature,  in 
the  aftertime  to  be  so  much  approved  to  us. 
However,  I  pause  before  the  aftertime,  into  the 
lap  of  which  more  than  one  sort  of  stored  sound 
ness  and  sweetness  was  to  fall  from  him  drop  by 
drop. 

I  scarce  know  whether  my  impulse  to  lead 
forth  these  most  shrinking  of  my  apparitions  be 
more  perverse  or  more  natural  —  mainly  feeling, 
I  confess,  however  it  appear,  that  the  rest  of  my 
impression  of  the  animated  Cambridge  scene,  so 
far  as  I  could  take  it  in,  was  anything  but  a 
vision  of  unasserted  forces.  It  was  only  I,  as 
now  appears  to  me,  who,  ready  as  yet  to  assert 
nothing,  hung  back,  and  for  reasons  even  more 
appreciable  to  me  to-day  than  then;  wondering, 
almost  regretting  as  I  do,  that  I  didn't  with  a 
still  sharper  promptness  throw  up  the  sponge  for 
stoppage  of  the  absurd  little  boxing-match  within 


340    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

me  between  the  ostensible  and  the  real  —  this  I 
mean  because  I  might  afterwards  thereby  have 
winced  a  couple  of  times  the  less  in  haunting 
remembrance  of  exhibited  inaptitude.  My  con 
dition  of  having  nothing  to  exhibit  was  blessedly 
one  that  there  was  nobody  to  quarrel  with  —  and 
I  couldn't  have  sufficiently  let  it  alone.  I  didn't 
in  truth,  under  a  misleading  light,  reconsider  it 
much;  yet  I  have  kept  to  this  hour  a  black  little 
memory  of  my  having  attempted  to  argue  one 
afternoon,  by  way  of  exercise  and  under  what 
seemed  to  me  a  perfect  glare  of  publicity,  the 
fierce  light  of  a  "moot-court,"  some  case  pro 
posed  to  me  by  a  fellow-student  —  who  can  only 
have  been  one  of  the  most  benign  of  men  unless 
he  was  darkly  the  designingest,  and  to  whom  I 
was  at  any  rate  to  owe  it  that  I  figured  my 
shame  for  years  much  in  the  image  of  my  having 
stood  forth  before  an  audience  with  a  fiddle  and 
bow  and  trusted  myself  to  rub  them  together 
desperately  enough  (after  the  fashion  of  Rousseau 
in  a  passage  of  the  Confessions,)  to  make  some 
appearance  of  music.  My  music,  I  recall,  before 
the  look  on  the  faces  around  me,  quavered  away 
into  mere  collapse  and  cessation,  a  void  now  en 
gulfing  memory  itself,  so  that  I  liken  it  all  to  a 
merciful  fall  of  the  curtain  on  some  actor  stricken 
and  stammering.  The  sense  of  the  brief  glare, 
as  I  have  called  the  luckless  exposure,  revives 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    341 

even  on  this  hither  side  of  the  wide  gulf  of  time; 
but  I  must  have  outlived  every  witness--!  was 
so  obviously  there  the  very  youngest  of  all 
aspirants  —  and,  in  truth,  save  for  one  or  two 
minor  and  merely  comparative  miscarriages  of 
the  sacrificial  act  before  my  false  gods,  my  con 
nection  with  the  temple  was  to  remain  as  con 
sistently  superficial  as  could  be  possible  to  a 
relation  still  restlessly  perceptive  through  all  its 
profaneness.  Perceiving,  even  with  its  accom- } 
paniments  of  noting,  wondering,  fantasticating,  • 
kicked  up  no  glare,  but  went  on  much  rather 
under  richest  shades  or  in  many-coloured  lights 
-  a  tone  of  opportunity  that  I  look  back  on 
as  somehow  at  once  deliciously  soothing  to  myself 
and  favourable  to  the  clearness  of  each  item  of 
the  picture  even  as  the  cool  grey  sky  of  a  land 
scape  is  equalising.  That  was  of  course  especially 
when  I  had  let  everything  slide  —  everything  but 
the  mere  act  of  rather  difficultly  living  (by  reason 
of  my  scant  physical  ease,)  and  fallen  back  again 
on  the  hard  sofa  of  certain  ancient  rooms  in  the 
Winthrop  Square,  contracted  nook,  of  a  local 
order  now  quite  abolished,  and  held  to  my  nose 
for  long  and  sustaining  sniffs  the  scented  flower 
of  independence.  I  took  my  independence  for 
romantic,  or  at  least  for  a  happy  form  of  yawning 
vessel  into  which  romance,  even  should  it  per 
force  consist  but  of  mere  loose  observational 


342    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

play,  might  drop  in  the  shape  of  ripe  fruit  from 
a  shaken  tree.  Winthrop  Square,  as  I  had 
occasion  to  note  a  couple  of  years  since,  is  a 
forgotten  name,  and  the  disappearance  of  my 
lodging  spares  me  doubtless  a  reminder,  possibly 
ironic,  of  the  debility  of  those  few  constructional 
and  pictorial  elements  that,  mustering  a  wondrous 
good- will,  I  had  invited  myself  to  rejoice  in  as 
"colonial."  The  house  was  indeed  very  old,  as 
antiquity  in  Cambridge  went,  with  everything 
in  it  slanting  and  gaping  and  creaking,  but  with 
humble  antique  "points"  and  a  dignity  in  its 
decay;  above  all  with  the  deep  recess  or  alcove, 
a  sweet  "irregularity"  (so  could  irregularities 
of  architectural  conception  then  and  there  count,) 
thrust  forth  from  its  sitting-room  toward  what 
I  supposed  to  be  the  Brighton  hills  and  forming, 
by  the  aid  of  a  large  window  and  that  command 
ing  view,  not  to  mention  the  grace  of  an  ancient 
expansive  bureau  or  secretary-desk  (this  such  a 
piece,  I  now  venture  to  figure,  as  would  to-day 
be  pounced  on  at  any  cunning  dealer's,)  a  veritable 
bower  toward  which  even  so  shy  a  dreamer  as 
I  still  then  had  to  take  myself  for  might  perhaps 
hope  to  woo  the  muse.  The  muse  was  of  course 
the  muse  of  prose  fiction  —  never  for  the  briefest 
hour  in  my  case  the  presumable,  not  to  say  the 
presuming,  the  much-taking-for-granted  muse  of 
rhyme,  with  whom  I  had  never  had,  even  in 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    343 

thought,  the  faintest  flirtation;  and  she  did,  in 
the  event,  I  note,  yield  to  the  seduction  of  so 
appointed  a  nook  —  as  to  which  romantic  passage, 
however,  I  may  not  here  anticipate.  I  but  lose 
myself  in  the  recovered  sense  of  what  it  richly 
"meant"  to  me  just  to  have  a  place  where  I 
could  so  handsomely  receive  her,  where  I  could 
remark  with  complacency  that  the  distant 
horizon,  an  horizon  long  since  rudely  obliterated, 
was  not,  after  all,  too  humble  to  be  blue,  purple, 
tawny,  changeable  in  short,  everything  an  horizon 
should  be,  and  that  over  the  intervening  marshes 
of  the  Charles  (if  I  don't  go  astray  in  so  much 
geography)  there  was  all  the  fine  complicated 
cloud-scenery  I  could  wish  —  so  extravagantly 
did  I  then  conceive  more  or  less  associational 
cloud-scenery,  after  the  fashion,  I  mean,  of  that 
feature  of  remembered  English  and  Boulognese 
water-colours,  to  promote  the  atmosphere  of 
literary  composition  as  the  act  had  begun  to 
glimmer  for  me. 

Everything,  however,  meant,  as  I  say,  more 
quite  other  things  than  I  can  pretend  now  to 
treat  of.  The  mere  fact  of  a  sudden  rupture,  as 
by  the  happiest  thought,  with  the  "form"  of 
bringing  home  from  the  Law-library  sheepskin 
volumes  that  might  give  my  table,  if  not,  for 
sufficiency  of  emphasis,  my  afflicted  self,  a  tem 
porary  countenance,  heaped  up  the  measure  of 


344     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

my  general  intention  —  from  the  moment  I  em 
braced  instead  of  it  the  practice  of  resorting  to 
Gore  Hall  exclusively  for  my  reading-matter; 
a  practice  in  the  light  of  which  my  general  inten 
tion  took  on  the  air  of  absolutely  basking.  To 
get  somehow,  and  in  spite  of  everything,  in  spite 
especially  of  being  so  much  disabled,  at  life,  that 
was  my  brooding  purpose,  straight  out  of  which 
the  College  library,  with  its  sparse  bristle  of 
aspiring  granite,  stood  open  to  far  more  enchanted 
distances  than  any  represented  by  the  leathery 
walls,  with  never  a  breach  amid  their  labelled 
and  numbered  blocks,  that  I  might  pretend  to 
beat  against  in  the  other  quarter.  Yet,  happily 
enough,  on  this  basis  of  general  rather  than  of 
special  culture,  I  still  loosely  rejoiced  in  being 
where  I  was,  and  by  way  of  proof  that  it  was  all 
right  the  swim  into  my  ken  of  Sainte-Beuve,  for 
whose  presence  on  my  table,  in  still  other  literary 
company,  Gore  Hall  aiding,  I  succeeded  in  not 
at  all  blushing,  became  in  the  highest  degree 
congruous  with  regular  attendance  at  lectures. 
The  forenoon  lectures  at  Dane  Hall  I  never  in 
all  my  time  missed,  that  I  can  recollect,  and  I 
look  back  on  it  now  as  quite  prodigious  that  I 
should  have  been  so  systematically  faithful  to 
them  without  my  understanding  the  first  word 
of  what  they  were  about.  They  contrived  —  or 
at  least  my  attendance  at  them  did,  inimitably  — 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    345 

to  be  "life;"  and  as  my  wondering  dips  into  the 
vast  deep  well  of  the  French  critic  to  whom  all 
my  roused  response  went  out  brought  up  that 
mystery  to  me  in  cupfuls  of  extraordinary  savour, 
where  was  the  incongruity  of  the  two  rites? 
That  the  Causeries  du  Lundi,  wholly  fresh  then 
to  my  grateful  lips,  should  so  have  overflowed  for 
me  was  certainly  no  marvel  —  that  prime  acquain 
tance  absolutely  having,  by  my  measure,  to  form 
a  really  sacred  date  in  the  development  of  any 
historic  or  aesthetic  consciousness  worth  men 
tioning;  but  that  I  could  be  to  the  very  end  more 
or  less  thrilled  by  simply  sitting,  all  stupid  and 
sentient,  in  the  thick  company  of  my  merely 
nominal  associates  and  under  the  strange  minis 
trations  of  Dr.  Theophilus  Parsons,  "Governor" 
Washburn  and  Professor  Joel  Parker,  would  have 
appeared  to  defy  explanation  only  for  those  by 
whom  the  phenomena  of  certain  kinds  of  living 
and  working  sensibility  are  unsuspected.  For 
myself  at  any  rate  there  was  no  anomaly  —  the 
anomaly  would  have  been  much  rather  in  any 
prompter  consciousness  of  a  sated  perception; 
I  knew  why  I  liked  to  "go,"  I  knew  even  why 
I  could  unabashedly  keep  going  in  face  of  the 
fact  that  if  I  had  learned  my  reason  I  had  learned, 
and  was  still  to  learn,  absolutely  nothing  else; 
and  that  sufficiently  supported  me  through  a 
stretch  of  bodily  overstrain  that  I  only  afterwards 


346     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

allowed  myself  dejectedly  to  measure.  The  mere 
sitting  at  attention  for  two  or  three  hours  —  such 
attention  as  I  achieved  —  was  paid  for  by  sorry 
pain;  yet  it  was  but  later  on  that  I  wondered 
how  I  could  have  found  what  I  "got"  an  equiva 
lent  for  the  condition  produced.  The  condition 
was  one  of  many,  and  the  others  for  the  most 
part  declared  themselves  with  much  of  an  equal, 
though  a  different,  sharpness.  It  was  acute,  that 
is,  that  one  was  so  incommoded,  but  it  had  broken 
upon  me  with  force  from  the  first  of  my  taking 
my  seat  —  which  had  the  advantage,  I  acknowl 
edge,  of  the  rim  of  the  circle,  symbolising  thereby 
all  the  detachment  I  had  been  foredoomed  to  — 
that  the  whole  scene  was  going  to  be,  and  again 
and  again,  as  "American,"  and  above  all  as 
suffused  with  New  England  colour,  however  one 
might  finally  estimate  that,  as  I  could  possibly 
have  wished.  Such  was  the  effect  of  one's  offer 
ing  such  a  plate  for  impressions  to  play  on  at 
their  will;  as  well  as  of  one's  so  failing  to  ask 
in  advance  what  they  would  matter,  so  taking 
for  granted  that  they  would  all  matter  somehow. 
It  would  matter  somehow  for  instance  that  just 
a  queer  dusky  half  smothered  light,  as  from 
windows  placed  too  low,  or  too  many  interposing 
heads,  should  hang  upon  our  old  auditorium  - 
long  since  voided  of  its  then  use  and,  with  all 
its  accessory  chambers,  seated  elsewhere  afresh 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    347 

and  in  much  greater  state;  which  glimpse  of  a 
scheme  of  values  might  well  have  given  the 
measure  of  the  sort  of  profit  I  was,  or  rather 
wasn't,  to  derive.  It  doubtless  quite  ought  to 
have  confounded  me  that  I  had  come  up  to  faire 
mon  droit  by  appreciations  predominantly  of  the 
local  chiaroscuro  and  other  like  quantities;  but 
I  remember  no  alarm  —  I  only  remember  with 
what  complacency  my  range  of  perception  on 
those  general  lines  was  able  to  spread. 

It  mattered,  by  the  same  law,  no  end  that 
Dr.  Theophilus  Parsons,  whose  rich,  if  slightly 
quavering,  old  accents  were  the  first  to  fall  upon 
my  ear  from  the  chair  of  instruction  beneath  a 
huge  hot  portrait  of  Daniel  Webster  should  at 
once  approve  himself  a  vivid  and  curiously- 
composed  person,  an  illustrative  figure,  as  who 
should  say  —  exactly  with  all  the  marks  one  might 
have  wished  him,  marks  of  a  social  order,  a  general 
air,  a  whole  history  of  things,  or  in  other  words 
of  people;  since  there  was  nothing  one  mightn't, 
by  my  sentiment,  do  with  such  a  subject  from  the 
moment  it  gave  out  character.  Character  thus 
was  all  over  the  place,  as  it  could  scarce  fail  to 
be  when  the  general  subject,  the  one  gone  in  for, 
had  become  identical  with  the  persons  of  all  its 
votaries.  Such  was  the  interest  of  the  source  of 
edification  just  named,  not  one  ray  of  whose 
merely  professed  value  so  much  as  entered  my 


348    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

mind.  Governor  Washburn  was  of  a  different, 
but  of  a  no  less  complete  consistency  —  queer, 
ingenuous,  more  candidly  confiding,  especially 
as  to  his  own  pleasant  fallibility,  than  I  had  ever 
before  known  a  chaired  dispenser  of  knowledge, 
and  all  after  a  fashion  that  endeared  him  to  his 
young  hearers,  whose  resounding  relish  of  the 
frequent  tangle  of  his  apologetic  returns  upon 
himself,  quite,  almost  always,  to  inextricability, 
was  really  affectionate  in  its  freedom.  I  could 
understand  and  admire  that  —  it  seemed  to  have 
for  me  legendary  precedents;  whereas  of  the 
third  of  our  instructors  I  mainly  recall  that  he 
represented  dryness  and  hardness,  prose  unre 
lieved,  at  their  deadliest  —  partly  perhaps  because 
he  was  most  master  of  his  subject.  He  was  none 
the  less  placeable  for  these  things  withal,  and 
what  mainly  comes  back  to  me  of  him  is  the  full 
sufficiency  with  which  he  made  me  ask  myself 
how.  I  could  for  a  moment  have  seen  myself  really 
browse  in  any  field  where  the  marks  of  the 
shepherd  were  such  an  oblong  dome  of  a  bare 
cranium,  such  a  fringe  of  dropping  little  ringlets 
toward  its  base,  and  a  mouth  so  meanly  retentive, 
so  ignorant  of  style,  as  I  made  out,  above  a  chin 
so  indifferent  to  the  duty,  or  at  least  to  the  oppor 
tunity,  of  chins.  If  I  had  put  it  to  myself  that 
there  was  no  excuse  for  the  presence  of  a  young 
person  so  affected  by  the  idea  of  how  people 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    349 

4 

looked  on  a  scene  where  the  issue  was  altogether 
what  they  usefully  taught,  as  well  as  intelligently 
learned   and   wanted   to   learn,   I   feel   I   should, 
after   my   first   flush   of   confusion,   have   replied 
assuredly   enough   that   just   the   beauty   of   the 
former  of  these  questions  was  in  its  being  of  equal 
application    everywhere;     which    was    far    from 
the  case  with  the  latter.     The  question  of  how 
people  looked,  and  of  how  their  look  counted  for 
a  thousand   relations,  had  risen  before  me  too 
early  and  kept  me  company  too  long  for  me  not 
to  have  made  a  fight  over  it,  from  the  very  shame 
of  appearing  at  all  likely  to  give  it  up,  had  some 
fleeting  delusion  led  me  to  cast  a  slur  upon  it. 
It  would  do,  I  was  already  sure,  half  the  work 
of  carrying  me  through  life,  and  where  was  better 
proof  of  all  it  would  have  to  give  than  just  in  the 
fact  of  what  it  was  then  and  there  doing?     It 
worked  for   appreciation  —  not  one   of  the   uses 
of  which  as  an  act  of  intelligence  had,  all  round, 
finer    connections;     and    on    the    day,    in    short, 
when  one  should  cease  to  live  in  large  measure  \ 
by  one's  eyes  (with  the  imagination  of  course  all; 
the  while  waiting  on  this)  one  would  have  taken 
the  longest  step  towards  not  living  at  all.     My1 
companions  —  however  scantly  indeed  they  were 
to  become  such  —  were  subject  to  my  so  practising 
in  a  degree  which  represented  well-nigh  the  whole 
of  my  relation  with  them,  small  reciprocity  for 


350     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

them  as  there  may  have  been  in  it;  since  vision, 
and  nothing  but  vision,  was  from  beginning  to  end 
.the  fruit  of  my  situation  among  them.  There 
was  not  one  of  them  as  to  whom  it  didn't  matter 
that  he  "looked,"  by  my  fancy  of  him,  thus  or 
so;  the  key  to  this  disposition  of  the  accents 
being  for  me  to  such  an  extent  that,  as  I  have  said, 
I  was  with  all  intensity  taking  in  New  England 
and  that  I  knew  no  better  immediate  way  than 
to  take  it  in  by  my  senses.  What  that  name 
really  comprehended  had  been  a  mystery,  daily 
growing  less,  to  which  everything  that  fell  upon 
those  senses  referred  itself,  making  the  innumer 
able  appearances  hang  together  ever  so  densely. 
Theophilus  Parsons,  with  his  tone,  his  unction, 
his  homage  still  to  some  ancient  superstition,  some 
standard  of  manners,  reached  back  as  to  a  state 
of  provincialism  rounded  and  compact,  quite 
self-supporting,  which  gave  it  serenity  and  quality, 
something  comparatively  rich  and  urban;  the 
good  ex-Governor,  on  the  other  hand,  of  whom 
I  think  with  singular  tenderness,  opened  through 
every  note  of  aspect  and  expression  straight  into 
those  depths  of  rusticity  which  more  and  more 
unmistakably  underlay  the  social  order  at  large 
and  out  of  which  one  felt  it  to  have  emerged  in 
any  degree  but  at  scattered  points.  Where  it  did 
emerge,  I  seemed  to  see,  it  held  itself  as  high  as 
possible,  conscious,  panting  a  little,  elate  with 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    351 

the  fact  of  having  cleared  its  skirts,  saved  its 
life,  consolidated  its  Boston,  yet  as  with  wastes 
unredeemed,  roundabout  it,  propping  up  and 
pushing  in  —  all  so  insistently  that  the  light  in 
which  one  for  the  most  part  considered  the  scene 
was  strongly  coloured  by  their  action.  This 
was  one's  clue  to  the  labyrinth,  if  labyrinth  it 
was  to  be  called  —  a  generalisation  into  which 
everything  fitted,  first  to  surprise  and  then  in 
dubitably  to  relief,  from  the  moment  one  had 
begun  to  make  it.  Under  its  law  the  Puritan 
capital,  however  visibly  disposed  to  spread  and 
take  on  new  disguises,  affected  me  as  a  rural 
centre  even  to  a  point  at  which  I  had  never  known 
anything  as  rural;  there  being  involved  with  this 
too  much  further  food  for  curiosity  and  wonder. 
Boston  was  in  a  manner  of  its  own  stoutly  and 
vividly  urban,  not  only  a  town,  but  a  town  of 
history  —  so  that  how  did  it  manage  to  be  such 
different  things  at  the  same  time?  That  was 
doubtless  its  secret  —  more  and  more  interesting 
to  study  in  proportion  as,  on  closer  acquaintance, 
yet  an  acquaintance  before  which  the  sense  of 
one's  preferred  view  from  outside  never  gave 
way,  one  felt  the  equilibrium  attained  as  on  the 
whole  an  odd  fusion  and  intermixture,  of  the 
chemical  sort  as  it  were,  and  not  a  matter  of  ele 
ments  or  aspects  sharply  alternating.  There  was 
in  the  exhibition  at  its  best  distinctly  a  savour 


352    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

-  an  excellent  thing  for  a  community  to  have, 
and  part  of  the  savour  was,  as  who  should  say, 
the  breath  of  the  fields  and  woods  and  waters, 
though  at  their  domesticated  and  familiarised 
stage,  or  the  echo  of  a  tone  which  had  somehow 
become  that  of  the  most  educated  of  our  societies 
without  ceasing  to  be  that  of  the  village. 

Of  so  much  from  the  first  I  felt  sure,  and  this 
all  the  more  that  by  my  recollection  of  New  York, 
even  indeed  by  my  recollection  of  Albany,  we 
had  been  aware  in  those  places  of  no  such  strain. 
New  York  at  least  had  been  whatever  disagreeable, 
not  to  say  whatever  agreeable,  other  thing  one 
might  have  declared  it  —  it  might  even  have  been 
vulgar,  though  that  cheap  substitute  for  an 
account  of  anything  didn't,  I  think,  in  the  con 
nection,  then  exist  for  me;  but  the  last  reference 
to  its  nature  likely  to  crop  up  in  its  social  soil 
was  beyond  question  the  flower  of  the  homely. 
New  England  had,  by  one's  impression,  cropped 
up  there,  but  had  done  so  just  as  New  England, 
New  England  unabsorbed  and  unreconciled; 
which  was  exactly  a  note  in  the  striated,  the 
piebald  or,  more  gracefully,  cosmopolite  local 
character.  I  am  not  sure  that  the  compara 
tively  --  I  say  comparatively  —  market-town  sug 
gestion  of  the  city  by  the  Charles  came  out  for 
me  as  a  positive  richness,  but  it  did  essentially 
contribute  to  what  had  become  so  highly  desirable, 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    353 

the  reinforcement  of  my  vision  of  American  life  ) 
by  the  idea  of  variety.  I  apparently  required 
of  anything  I  should  take  to  my  heart  that  it 
should  be,  approached  at  different  angles,  "like" 
as  many  other  things  as  possible  —  in  accordance 
with  which  it  made  for  a  various  "America" 
that  Boston  should  seem  really  strong,  really 
quaint  and  amusing  and  beguiling  or  whatever, 
in  not  having,  for  better  or  worse,  the  same 
irrepressible  likenesses  as  New  York.  I  invoked, 
I  called  down  the  revelation  of,  new  likenesses  by 
the  simple  act  of  threading  the  Boston  streets, 
whether  by  garish  day  (the  afterglow  of  the  great 
snowfalls  of  winter  was  to  turn  in  particular  to 
a  blinding  glare,  an  unequalled  hardness  of  light,) 
or  under  that  mantle  of  night  which  draped  as 
with  the  garb  of  adventure  our  long-drawn  town- 
ward  little  rumbles  in  the  interest  of  the  theatre 
or  of  Parker's  —  oh  the  sordid,  yet  never  in  the 
least  deterrent  conditions  of  transit  in  that  age 
of  the  unabbreviated,  the  dividing  desert  and  the 
primitive  horse-car!  (The  desert  is  indeed,  de 
spite  other  local  developments  and  the  general 
theory  of  the  rate  at  which  civilisation  spreads 
and  ugliness  wanes,  still  very  much  what  it  was 
in  the  last  mid-century,  but  the  act  of  passage 
through  it  has  been  made  to  some  extent  easier.) 
Parker's  played  in  the  intercourse  of  Cambridge 
with  Boston  a  part  of  a  preponderance  that  I 


354     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

look  back  upon,  I  confess,  as  the  very  condition 
of  the  purest  felicity  we  knew  —  I  knew  at  any 
rate  myself  none,  whether  of  a  finer  or  a  grosser 
strain,  that  competed  with  this  precious  relation. 
Competition  has  thickened  since  and  proportions 
have  altered  —  to  no  small  darkening  of  the  air, 
but  the  time  was  surely  happier;  a  single  such 
point  de  repere  not  only  sufficed  but  richly  heaped 
up  the  measure.  Parker's,  on  the  whole  side  of 
the  joy  of  life,  was  Boston  —  speaking  as  under 
the  thrill  of  early  occasions  recaptured;  Boston 
could  be  therefore,  in  the  acutest  connections, 
those  of  young  comradeship  and  young  esthetic 
experience,  heaven  save  the  mark,  fondly  pre 
pared  or  properly  crowned,  but  the  enjoyed  and 
shared  repast,  literally  the  American  feast,  as  I 
then  appraised  such  values;  a  basis  of  native 
abundance  on  which  everything  else  rested.  The 
theatre,  resorted  to  whenever  possible,  rested 
indeed  doubtless  most,  though  with  its  heaviest 
weight  thrown  perhaps  at  a  somewhat  later  time; 
the  theatre  my  uncanny  appetite  for  which  strikes 
me  as  almost  abnormal  in  the  light  of  what  I 
braved  to  reach  it  from  the  studious  suburb,  or 
more  particularly  braved  to  return  from  it.  I 
touch  alas  no  spring  that  doesn't  make  a  hum  of 
memories,  and  pick  them  over  as  I  will  three  or 
four  of  that  scenic  strain  linger  on  my  sense.  The 
extraordinary  fact  about  these  —  which  plays  into 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    355 

my  generalisation  a  little  way  back  —  was  that, 
for  all  the  connection  of  such  occasions  with  the 
great  interest  of  the  theatre  at  large,  there  was 
scarce  an  impression  of  the  stage  wrung  from 
current  opportunity  that  didn't  somehow  under 
score  itself  with  the  special  Boston  emphasis; 
and  this  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  plays  and  per 
formers  in  those  days  were  but  a  shade  less 
raggedly  itinerant  over  the  land  than  they  are 
now.  The  implication  of  the  provincial  in  the 
theatric  air,  and  of  the  rustic  in  the  provincial, 
may  have  been  a  matter  of  the  "house"  itself, 
with  its  twenty  kinds  of  redolence  of  barbarism  - 
with  the  kind  determined  by  the  very  audience 
perhaps  indeed  plainest;  vivid  to  me  at  all  events 
is  it  how  I  felt  even  at  the  time,  in  repairing 
to  the  Howard  Atheneum  to  admire  Miss  Maggie 
Mitchell  and  Miss  Kate  Bateman,  that  one  would 
have  had  only  to  scratch  a  little  below  the  surface 
of  the  affair  to  come  upon  the  but  half -buried 
Puritan  curse  not  so  very  long  before  devoted 
to  such  perversities.  Wasn't  the  curse  still  in 
the  air,  and  could  anything  less  than  a  curse, 
weighing  from  far  back  on  the  general  conscience, 
have  accounted  for  one  could  scarce  say  what 
want  of  self-respect  in  the  total  exhibition?  — 
for  that  intimation  more  than  anything  else 
perhaps  of  the  underhand  snicker  with  which  one 
sat  so  oddly  associated.  By  the  blest  law  of 


356    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

youth  and  fancy  withal  one  did  admire  the 
actress  —  the  young  need  to  admire  as  flatly  as 
one  could  broke  through  all  crowding  apprehen 
sions.  I  like  to  put  it  down  that  nothing  in  the 
world  qualified  my  wonder  at  the  rendering  by 
the  first  of  the  performers  I  have  named  of  the 
figure  of  "Fanchon  the  Cricket"  in  a  piece  so 
entitled,  an  artless  translation  from  a  German 
original,  if  I  rightly  remember,  which  original 
had  been  an  arrangement  for  the  stage  of  La 
Petite  Fadette,  George  Sand's  charming  rustic 
idyll.  I  like  to  put  it  down  that  Miss  Maggie 
Mitchell's  having  for  years,  as  I  gathered,  twanged 
that  one  string  and  none  other,  every  night  of 
her  theatric  life,  over  the  huge  country,  before 
she  was  revealed  to  us  —  just  as  Mr.  Joe  Jefferson, 
with  no  word  of  audible  reprehension  ever  once 
addressed  to  him,  was  to  have  twanged  his  —  did 
nothing  to  bedim  the  brightness  of  our  vision 
or  the  apparent  freshness  of  her  art,  and  that 
above  all  it  seemed  a  privilege  critically  to  dis 
engage  the  delicacy  of  this  art  and  the  rare  effect 
of  the  natural  in  it  from  the  baseness  in  which 
it  was  framed:  so  golden  a  glimmer  is  shed,  as 
one  looks  back,  from  any  shaky  little  torch 
lighted,  by  whatever  fond  stretch,  at  the  high 
esthetic  flame.  Upon  these  faint  sparks  in  the 
night  of  time  would  I  gently  breathe,  just  to  see 
them  again  distinguishably  glow,  rather  than 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    357 

leave  their  momentary  function  uncommemo- 
rated.  Strange  doubtless  were  some  of  the  things 
that  represented  these  momentary  functions  - 
strange  I  mean  in  proportion  to  the  fires  they 
lighted.  The  small  bower  of  the  muse  in  Win- 
throp  Square  was  first  to  know  the  fluttered 
descent  of  the  goddess  to  my  appeal  for  her  aid 
in  the  composition  of  a  letter  from  which  the 
admired  Miss  Maggie  should  gather  the  full  force 
of  my  impression.  Particularly  do  I  incline  even 
now  to  mention  that  she  testified  to  her  having 
gratefully  gathered  it  by  the  despatch  to  me  in 
return  of  a  little  printed  copy  of  the  play,  a  scant 
pamphlet  of  "acting  edition"  humility,  addressed 
in  a  hand  which  assumed  a  romantic  cast  as  soon 
as  I  had  bethought  myself  of  finding  for  it  a 
happy  precedent  in  that  of  Pendennis's  Miss 
Fotheringay. 

It  had  been  perhaps  to  the  person  of  this 
heroine  that  Pendennis  especially  rendered  hom 
age,  while  I,  without  illusions,  or  at  least  without 
confusions,  was  fain  to  discriminate  in  favour  of 
the  magic  of  method,  that  is  of  genius,  itself; 
which  exactly,  more  than  anything  else  could 
have  done  (success,  as  I  considered,  crowning  my 
demonstration,)  contributed  to  consecrate  to  an 
exquisite  use,  the  exquisite,  my  auspicious  reduit 
aforesaid.  For  an  esthetic  vibration  to  whatever 
touch  had  but  to  be  intense  enough  to  tremble 


358    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

on  into  other  reactions  under  other  blest  contacts 
and  commotions.  It  was  by  the  operation  again 
of  the  impulse  shaking  me  up  to  an  expression  of 
what  the  elder  star  of  the  Howard  Atheneum  had 
artistically  "meant"  to  me  that  I  first  sat  down 
beside  my  view  of  the  Brighton  hills  to  enrol 
myself  in  the  bright  band  of  the  fondly  hoping 
and  fearfully  doubting  who  count  the  days  after 
the  despatch  of  manuscripts.  I  formally  ad 
dressed  myself  under  the  protection,  not  to  say 
the  inspiration,  of  Winthrop  Square  to  the 
profession  of  literature,  though  nothing  would 
induce  me  now  to  name  the  periodical  on  whose 
protracted  silence  I  had  thus  begun  to  hang  with 
my  own  treasures  of  reserve  to  match  it.  The 
bearing  of  which  shy  ecstasies  —  shy  of  exhibition 
then,  that  is,  save  as  achievements  recognised  — 
is  on  their  having  thus  begun,  at  any  rate,  to 
supply  all  the  undertone  one  needed  to  whatever 
positive  perfunctory  show;  the  show  proceeding 
as  it  could,  all  the  while,  thanks  to  much  help 
from  the  undertone,  which  felt  called  upon  at 
times  to  be  copious.  It  is  not,  I  allow,  that 
memory  may  pretend  for  me  to  keep  the  two 
elements  .of  the  under  and  the  over  always  quite 
distinct  —  it  would  have  been  a  pity  all  round,  in 
truth,  should  they  have  altogether  escaped  mixing 
and  fraternising.  The  positive  perfunctory  show, 
at  all  events,  to  repeat  my  term,  hitched  itself 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    359 

along  from  point  to  point,  and  could  have  no 
lack  of  outside  support  to  complain  of,  I  reflect, 
from  the  moment  I  could  make  my  own  every 
image  and  incitement  —  those,  as  I  have  noted, 
of  the  supply  breaking  upon  me  with  my  first 
glimpse  of  the  Cambridge  scene.  If  I  seem  to 
make  too  much  of  these  it  is  because  I  at  the 
time  made  still  more,  more  even  than  my  pious 
record  has  presumed  to  set  down.  The  air  of 
truth  doubtless  hangs  uneasy,  as  the  matter 
stands,  over  so  queer  a  case  as  my  having,  by 
my  intimation  above,  found  appreciability  in 
life  at  the  Law  School  even  under  the  failure 
for  me  of  everything  generally  drawn  upon  for 
it,  whether  the  glee  of  study,  the  ardour  of  battle 
or  the  joy  of  associated  adventure.  Not  to  have 
felt  earlier  sated  with  the  mere  mechanic  amuse 
ment  or  vain  form  of  regularity  at  lectures  would 
strike  me  to-day  as  a  fact  too  "rum"  for  belief 
if  certain  gathered  flowers  by  the  way,  flowers 
of  perverse  appreciation  though  they  might  but 
be,  didn't  give  out  again  as  I  turn  them  over 
their  unspeakable  freshness.  They  were  perforce 
gathered  (what  makes  it  still  more  wondrous)  all 
too  languidly;  yet  they  massed  themselves  for 
my  sense,  through  the  lapsing  months,  to  the 
final  semblance  of  an  intimate  secret  garden. 
Such  was  the  odd,  the  almost  overwhelming 
consequence  —  or  one  of  these,  for  they  are  many 


360    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

—  of  an  imagination  to  which  literally  everything 
obligingly  signified.  One  of  the  actual  penalties 
of  this  is  that  so  few  of  such  ancient  importances 
remain  definable  or  presentable.  It  may  in  the 
fulness  of  time  simply  sound  bete  that,  with  the 
crash  of  greater  questions  about  one,  I  should 
have  been  positively  occupied  with  such  an  affair 
as  the  degree  and  the  exact  shade  to  which  the 
blest  figures  in  the  School  array,  each  quite  for 
himself,  might  settle  and  fix  the  weight,  the 
interest,  the  function,  as  it  were,  of  his  American 
ism.  I  could  scarce  have  cleared  up  even  for 
myself,  I  dare  say,  the  profit,  or  more  pertinently 
the  charm,  of  that  extravagance  —  and  the  fact 
was  of  course  that  I  didn't  feel  it  as  extravagance, 
but  quite  as  homely  thrift,  moral,  social,  esthetic, 
or  indeed,  as  I  might  have  been  quite  ready  to 
say,  practical  and  professional.  It  was  practical 
at  least  in  the  sense  that  it  probably  more  helped 
to  pass  the  time  than  all  other  pursuits  together. 
The  real  proof  of  which  would  be  of  course  my 
being  able  now  to  string  together  for  exhibition 
some  of  these  pearls  of  differentiation  —  since  it 
was  to  differentiation  exactly  that  I  was  then, 
in  my  innocence,  most  prompted;  not  dreaming 
of  the  stiff  law  by  which,  on  the  whole  American 
ground,  division  of  type,  in  the  light  of  opposition 
and  contrast,  was  more  and  more  to  break  down 
for  me  and  fail:  so  that  verily  the  recital  of  my 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    361 

mere  concomitant  efforts  to  pick  it  up  again  and 
piece  its  parts  together  and  make  them  somehow 
show  and  serve  would  be  a  record  of  clinging 
courage.  I  may  note  at  once,  however,  as  a  light 
on  the  anomaly,  that  there  hung  about  all  young 
appearances  at  that  period  something  ever  so 
finely  derivative  and  which  at  this  day  rather 
defies  re-expression  —  the  common  character  or 
shared  function  of  the  precious  clay  so  largely 
making  up  the  holocausts  of  battle;  an  advantage 
working  for  them  circuitously  or  perhaps  am 
biguously  enough,  I  grant,  but  still  placing  them 
more  or  less  under  the  play  of  its  wing  even  when 
the  arts  of  peace  happened  for  the  hour  to  engage 
them.  They  potentially,  they  conceivably,  they 
indirectly  paid,  and  nothing  was  for  the  most 
part  more  ascertainable  of  them  individually 
than  that,  with  brothers  or  other  near  relatives 
in  the  ranks  or  in  commands,  they  came,  to  their 
credit,  of  paying  families.  All  of  which  again 
may  represent  the  high  pitch  of  one's  associated 
sensibility  —  there  having  been  occasions  of  crisis, 
were  they  worth  recovering,  when  under  its 
action  places,  persons,  objects  animate  or  not, 
glimmered  alike  but  through  the  grand  idealising, 
the  generalising,  blur.  At  moments  of  less  fine 
a  strain,  it  may  be  added,  the  sources  of  interest 
presented  themselves  in  looser  formation.  The 
young  appearances,  as  I  like  to  continue  to  call 


362    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

them,  could  be  pleasingly,  or  at  least  robustly 
homogeneous,  and  yet,  for  livelier  appeal  to 
fancy,  flower  here  and  there  into  special  cases 
of  elegant  deviation  —  "  sports,"  of  exotic  com 
plexion,  one  enjoyed  denominating  these  (or 
would  have  enjoyed  had  the  happy  figure  then 
flourished)  thrown  off  from  the  thick  stem  that 
was  rooted  under  our  feet.  Even  these  rare 
exceptions,  the  few  apparitions  referring  them 
selves  to  other  producing  conditions  than  the 
New  England,  wrought  by  contrast  no  havoc  in 
the  various  quantities  for  which  that  section  was 
responsible;  it  was  certainly  refreshing  —  always 
to  the  fond  imagination  —  that  there  were,  for  a 
change,  imprints  in  the  stuff  of  youth  that  didn't 
square  with  the  imprint,  virtually  one  throughout, 
imposed  by  Springfield  or  Worcester,  by  Provi 
dence  or  Portland,  or  whatever  rural  wastes 
might  lie  between;  yet  the  variations,  I  none  the 
less  gather  as  I  strive  to  recall  them,  beguiled 
the  spirit  (talking  always  of  my  own)  rather  than 
coerced  it,  and  this  even  though  fitting  into  life 
as  one  had  already  more  or  less  known  it,  fitting 
in,  that  is,  with  more  points  of  contact  and  more 
reciprocation  of  understanding  than  the  New 
England  relation  seemed  able  to  produce.  It 
could  in  fact  fairly  blind  me  to  the  implication 
of  an  inferior  immediate  portee  that  such  and 
such  a  shape  of  the  New  York  heterogeneity, 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    363 

however  simplified  by  silliness,  or  at  least  by 
special  stupidity  (though  who  was  I  to  note 
that?)  pressed  a  certain  spring  of  association, 
waiting  as  I  always  was  for  such  echoes,  rather 
than  left  it  either  just  soundless  or  bunglingly 
touched. 

It  was  for  example  a  link  with  the  larger  life, 
as  I  am  afraid  I  must  have  privately  called  it, 
that  a  certain  young  New  Yorker,  an  outsider 
of  still  more  unmistakable  hue  than  I  could 
suppose  even  myself,  came  and  went  before  us 
with  an  effect  of  cultivated  detachment  that  I 
admired  at  the  time  for  its  perfect  consistency, 
and  that  caused  him,  it  was  positively  thrilling 
to  note,  not  in  the  least  to  forfeit  sympathy,  but 
to  shine  in  the  high  light  of  public  favour.  The 
richest  reflections  sprang  for  me  from  this,  some 
of  them  inspiring  even  beyond  the  promptly 
grasped  truth,  a  comparative  commonplace,  that 
the  variation  or  opposition  sufficiently  embodied, 
the  line  of  divergence  sharply  enough  drawn, 
always  achieves  some  triumph  by  the  fact  of  its 
emphasis,  by  its  putting  itself  through  at  any 
cost,  any  cost  in  particular  of  ridicule.  So  much 
one  had  often  observed;  but  what  really  enriched 
the  dear  induction  and  made  our  friend's  instance 
thus  remain  with  me  was  the  part  played  by  the 
utter  blandness  itself  of  his  protest,  such  an 
exhibition  of  the  sweet  in  the  imperturbable. 


364     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

This  it  was  that  enshrined  him,  by  my  vision, 
in  a  popularity  than  which  nothing  could  have 
seemed  in  advance  less  indicated,  and  that  makes 
me  wonder  to-day  whether  he  was  simply  the 
luckiest  of  gamblers  or  just  a  conscious  and 
consummate  artist.  He  reappears  to  me  as  a 
finished  fop,  finished  to  possibilities  we  hadn't 
then  dreamt  of,  and  as  taking  his  stand,  or  rather 
taking  all  his  walks,  on  that,  the  magician's  wand 
of  his  ideally  tight  umbrella  under  his  arm  and 
the  magician's  familiar  of  his  bristling  toy-terrier 
at  his  heels.  He  became  thus  an  apparition 
entrancing  to  the  mind.  His  clothes  were  of  a 
perfection  never  known  nor  divined  in  that  sphere, 
a  revelation,  straight  and  blindingly  authentic, 
of  Savile  Row  in  its  prime;  his  single  eyeglass 
alone,  and  his  inspired,  his  infinite  use  of  it  as  at 
once  a  defensive  crystal  wall  and  a  lucid  window 
of  hospitality,  one  couldn't  say  most  which, 
might  well  have  foredoomed  him,  by  all  likelihood, 
to  execration  and  destruction.  He  became  none 
the  less,  as  I  recover  him,  our  general  pride  and 
joy;  his  entrances  and  exits  were  acclaimed 
beyond  all  others,  and  it  was  his  rare  privilege 
to  cause  the  note  of  derision  and  the  note  of 
affection  to  melt  together,  beyond  separation, 
in  vague  but  virtual  homage  to  the  refreshment 
of  felt  type.  To  see  it  dawn  upon  rude  breasts 
(for  rude,  comparatively,  were  the  breasts  of  the 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    365 

typeless,  or  at  the  best  of  the  typed  but  in  one 
character,    throughout    the    same,)    that    defiant 
and  confident  difference  carried  far  enough  might 
avert  the  impulse  to  slay,  was  to  muse  ever  so 
agreeably  on  the   queer  means  by  which  great 
morals,  picking  up  a  life  as  they  may,  can  still 
get  themselves  pointed.     The  "connotation"   of 
the   trivial,    it   was   thus    attaching    to    remark, 
could  perfectly  serve  when  that  of  the  important, 
roughly  speaking,  failed  for  a  grateful  connection 
—  from    the    moment    some    such    was    massed 
invitingly  in  view.     The  difficulty  with  the  type\ 
about  me  was  that,  in  its  monotony,  beginning^ 
and  ending  with  itself,  it  had  no  connections  and  \    ^' 
suggested  none;    whereas  the  grace  of  the  salient  v 
apparition  I  have  perhaps  too  earnestly  presented 
lay    in    its    bridging    over    our    separation    froml 
worlds,  from  great  far-off  reservoirs,  of  a  different  1 
mixture    altogether,    another    civility    and    com- 1 
plexity.     Young     as    I    was,    I    myself    clearly 
recognised  that  ground  of  reference,  saw  it  even 
to  some  extent  in  the  light  of  experience  —  so 
could  I  stretch  any  scrap  of  contact;    kept  hold 
of  it  by  fifty  clues,  recalls  and  reminders  that 
dangled  for  me  mainly  out  of  books  and  magazines 
and  heard  talk,  things  of  picture  and  story,  things  j 
of  prose   and   verse   and   anecdotal   vividness   in  j 
fine,  and,  as  I  have  elsewhere  allowed,  for  the  I 
most  part  hoardedly  English  and  French.     Our 


366    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

"character  man"  of  the  priceless  monocle  and 
the  trotting  terrier  was  "like"  some  type  in  a 
collection  of  types  —  that  was  the  word  for  it; 
and,  there  being  no  collection,  nor  the  ghost  of 
one,  roundabout  us,  was  a  lone  courageous 
creature  in  the  desert  of  our  bald  reiterations. 
The  charm  of  which  conclusion  was  exactly,  as 
I  have  said,  that  the  common  voice  did,  by  every 
show,  bless  him  for  rendered  service,  his  dropped 
hint  of  an  ideal  containing  the  germ  of  other 
ideals  —  and  confessed  by  that  fact  to  more 
appetites  and  inward  yearnings  than  it  the  least 
bit  consciously  counted  up. 

Not  quite  the  same  service  was  rendered  by 
G.  A.  J.,  who  had  no  ridicule  to  brave,  and  I  can 
speak  with  confidence  but  of  the  connections, 
rather  confused  if  they  were,  opened  up  to  me 
by  his  splendid  aspect  and  which  had  absolutely 
nothing  in  common  with  the  others  that  hung 
near.  It  was  brilliant  to  a  degree  that  none 
other  had  by  so  much  as  a  single  shade  the  secret 
of,  and  it  carried  the  mooning  fancy  to  a  further 
reach  even,  on  the  whole,  than  the  figure  of 
surprise  I  have  just  commemorated;  this  last 
comparatively  scant  in  itself  and  rich  only  by 
what  it  made  us  read  into  it,  and  G.  A.  J.  on  the 
other  hand  intrinsically  and  actively  ample  and 
making  us  read  wonders,  as  it  were,  into  whatever 
it  might  be  that  was,  as  we  used  to  say,  "back 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    367 

of"  him.  He  had  such  a  flush  of  life  and  presence 
as  to  make  that  reference  mysteriously  and 
inscrutably  loom  —  and  the  fascinating  thing 
about  this,  as  we  again  would  have  said,  was  that 
it  could  strike  me  as  so  beguilingly  American. 
That  too  was  part  of  the  glamour,  that  its  being 
so  could  kick  up  a  mystery  which  one  might  have 
pushed  on  to  explore,  whereas  our  New  York 
friend  only  kicked  up  a  certainty  (for  those 
properly  prepared)  and  left  not  exploration,  but 
mere  assured  satisfaction,  the  mark  of  the  case. 
G.  A.  J.  reached  westward,  westward  even  of  New 
York,  and  southward  at  least  as  far  as  Virginia; 
teeming  facts  that  I  discovered,  so  to  speak, 
by  my  own  unaided  intelligence  —  so  little  were 
they  responsibly  communicated.  Little  was  com 
municated  that  I  recover  —  it  would  have  had  to 
drop  from  too  great  a  personal  height;  so  that 
the  fun,  as  I  may  call  it,  was  the  greater  for  my 
opening  all  by  myself  to  perceptions.  I  was 
getting  furiously  American,  in  the  big  sense  I 
invoked,  through  this  felt  growth  of  an  ability 
to  reach  out  westward,  southward,  anywhere, 
everywhere,  on  that  apprehension  of  finding 
myself  but  patriotically  charmed.  Thus  there 
dawned  upon  me  the  grand  possibility  that, 
charm  for  charm,  the  American,  the  assumed, 
the  postulated,  would,  in  the  particular  case  of  its 
really  acting,  count  double;  whereas  the  Euro- 


368    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

t 

pean  paid  for  being  less  precarious  by  being  also 
less  miraculous.  It  counted  single,  as  one  might 
say,  and  only  made  up  for  that  by  counting 
almost  always.  It  mightn't  be  anything  like 
almost  always,  even  at  the  best,  no  doubt,  that 
an  American-grown  value  of  aspect  would  so 
entirely  emerge  as  G.  A.  J.'s  seemed  to  do;  but 
what  did  this  exactly  point  to  unless  that  the 
rarity  so  implied  would  be  in  the  nature  of  the 
splendid?  That  at  least  was  the  way  the  culti 
vation  of  patriotism  as  a  resource  was  the  culti 
vation  of  workable  aids  to  the  same,  however 
ingenious  these.  (Just  to  glow  belligerently  with 
one's  country  was  no  resource,  but  a  primitive 
instinct  breaking  through;  and  besides  this 
resources  were  cooling,  not  heating.)  It  might 
have  seemed  that  I  might  after  all  perfectly 
dispense  with  friends  when  simple  acquaintances, 
and  rather  feared  ones  at  that,  though  feared  but 
for  excess  of  lustre,  could  kindle  in  the  mind  such 
bonfires  of  thought,  feeding  the  flame  with  ges 
tures  and  sounds  and  light  accidents  of  passage 
so  beyond  their  own  supposing.  In  spite  of  all 
which,  however,  G.  A.  J.  was  marked  for  a  friend 
and  taken  for  a  kinsman  from  the  day  when  his 
blaze  of  colour  should  have  sufficiently  cleared 
itself  up  for  me  to  distinguish  the  component 
shades. 


XI 

I  AM  fully  aware  while  I  go,  I  should  mention, 
of  all  that  flows  from  the  principle  governing, 
by  my  measure,  these  recoveries  and  reflec 
tions  —  even  to  the  effect,  hoped  for  at  least,  of 
stringing  their  apparently  dispersed  and  dis 
ordered  parts  upon  a  fine  silver  thread ;  none  other 
than  the  principle  of  response  to  a  long-sought 
occasion,  now  gratefully  recognised,  for  making 
trial  of  the  recording  and  figuring  act  on  behalf  of 
some  case  of  the  imaginative  faculty  under  culti 
vation.  The  personal  history,  as  it  were,  of  an 
imagination,  a  lively  one  of  course,  in  a  given  and 
favourable  case,  had  always  struck  me  as  a  task 
that  a  teller  of  tales  might  rejoice  in,  his  advance 
through  it  conceivably  causing  at  every  step  some 
rich  precipitation  —  unless  it  be  rather  that  the 
play  of  strong  imaginative  passion,  passion  strong 
enough  to  be,  for  its  subject  or  victim,  the  very 
interest  of  life,  constitutes  in  itself  an  endless 
crisis.  Fed  by  every  contact  and  every 
apprehension,  and  feeding  in  turn  every  motion 
and  every  act,  wouldn't  the  light  in  which  it 
might  so  cause  the  whole  scene  of  life  to  unroll 
inevitably  become  as  fine  a  thing  as  possible  to 

369 


370    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

represent?  The  idea  of  some  pretext  for  such 
an  attempt  had  again  and  again,  naturally, 
haunted  me;  the  man  of  imagination,  and  of  an 
"awfully  good"  one,  showed,  as  the  creature 
of  that  force  or  the  sport  of  that  fate  or  the 
wielder  of  that  arm,  for  the  hero  of  a  hundred 
possible  fields  —  if  one  could  but  first  "catch" 
him,  after  the  fashion  of  the  hare  in  the  famous 
receipt.  Who  and  what  might  he  prove,  when 
caught,  in  respect  to  other  signs  and  conditions? 
He  might  take,  it  would  seem,  some  finding  and 
launching,  let  alone  much  handling  —  which  itself, 
however,  would  be  exactly  part  of  the  pleasure. 
Meanwhile,  it  no  less  appeared,  there  were  other 
subjects  to  go  on  with,  and  even  if  one  had  to 
wait  for  him  he  would  still  perhaps  come.  It 
happened  for  me  that  he  was  belatedly  to  come, 
but  that  he  was  to  turn  up  then  in  a  shape  almost 
too  familiar  at  first  for  recognition,  the  shape  of 
one  of  those  residual  substitutes  that  engage 
doubting  eyes  the  day  after  the  fair.  He  had 
been  with  me  all  the  while,  and  only  too  obscurely 
and  intimately  -  - 1  had  not  found  him  in  the 
market  as  an  exhibited  or  offered  value.  I  had 
in  a  word  to  draw  him  forth  from  within  rather 
than  meet  him  in  the  world  before  me,  the  more 
convenient  sphere  of  the  objective,  and  to  make 
him  objective,  in  short,  had  to  turn  nothing  less 
than  myself  inside  out.  What  was  7  thus, 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    371 

within  and  essentially,  what  had  I  ever  been  and 
could  I  ever  be  but  a  man  of  imagination  at  the 
active  pitch?  —  so  that  if  it  was  a  question  of 
treating  some  happy  case,  any  that  would  give 
me  what,  artistically  speaking,  I  wanted,  here  on 
the  very  spot  was  one  at  hand  in  default  of  a 
better.  It  wasn't  what  I  should  have  preferred, 
yet  it  was  after  all  the  example  I  knew  best  and 
should  feel  most  at  home  with  —  granting  always 
that  objectivity,  the  prize  to  be  won,  shouldn't 
just  be  frightened  away  by  the  odd  terms  of  the 
affair.  It  is  of  course  for  my  reader  to  say 
whether  or  no  what  I  have  done  has  meant 
defeat;  yet  even  if  this  should  be  his  judgment 
I  fall  back  on  the  interest,  at  the  worst,  of  certain 
sorts  of  failure.  I  shall  have  brought  up  from 
the  deep  many  things  probably  not  to  have  been 
arrived  at  for  the  benefit  of  these  pages  without 
my  particular  attempt.  Sundry  of  such  I  seem 
still  to  recognise,  and  not  least  just  now  those 
involved  in  that  visionary  "assistance"  at  the 
drama  of  the  War,  from  however  far  off,  which 
had  become  a  habit  for  us  without  ceasing  to  be 
a  strain.  I  am  sure  I  thought  more  things  under 
that  head,  with  the  fine  visionary  ache,  than  I 
thought  in  all  other  connections  together;  for 
the  simple  reason  that  one  had  to  ask  leave  —  of 
one's  own  spirit  —  for  these  last  intermissions, 
whereas  one  but  took  it,  with  both  hands  free, 


372    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

for  one's  sense  of  the  bigger  cause.  There  was 
not  in  that  the  least  complication  of  conscious 
ness.  I  have  sufficiently  noted  how  my  appre 
hension  of  the  bigger  cause  was  at  the  same  time, 
and  this  all  through,  at  once  quickened  and  kept 
low;  to  the  point  that  positively  my  whole 
acquaintance  of  the  personal  sort  even  with  such 
a  matter  as  my  brother  Wilky's  enrolment  in  the 
44th  Massachusetts  was  to  reduce  itself  to  but 
a  single  visit  to  him  in  camp. 

I  recall  an  afternoon  at  Readville,  near  Boston, 
and  the  fashion  in  which  his  state  of  juniority 
gave  way,  for  me,  on  the  spot,  to  immensities  of 
superior  difference,  immensities  that  were  at  the 
same  time  intensities,  varieties,  supremacies,  of 
the  enviable  in  the  all-difficult  and  the  delightful 
in  the  impossible:  such  a  fairy-tale  seemed  it, 
and  withal  such  a  flat  revolution,  that  this  soft 
companion  of  my  childhood  should  have  such 
romantic  chances  and  should  have  mastered,  by 
the  mere  aid  of  his  native  gaiety  and  sociability, 
such  mysteries,  such  engines,  such  arts.  To 
become  first  a  happy  soldier  and  then  an  easy 
officer  was  in  particular  for  G.  W.  J.  an  exercise 
of  sociability  —  and  that  above  all  was  my  ex 
tract  of  the  Readville  scene,  which  most  came  home 
to  me  as  a  picture,  an  interplay  of  bright  breezy 
air  and  high  shanty-covered  levels  with  blue 
horizons,  and  laughing,  welcoming,  sunburnt  young 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    373 

men,  who  seemed  mainly  to  bristle,  through  their 
welcome,  with  Boston  genealogies,  and  who  had 
all  alike  turned  handsome,  only  less  handsome 
than  their  tawny-bearded  Colonel,  under  I 
couldn't  have  said  what  common  grace  of  clear 
blue  toggery  imperfectly  and  hitchingly  donned 
in  the  midst  of  the  camp  labours  that  I  gaped  at 
(by  the  blessing  of  heaven  I  could  in  default  of 
other  adventures  still  gape)  as  at  shining  revels. 
I  couldn't  "do  things,"  I  couldn't  indefinitely 
hang  about,  though  on  occasion  I  did  so,  as  it 
comes  back  to  me,  verily  to  desperation;  which 
had  to  be  my  dim  explanation  —  dim  as  to  my 
ever  insisting  on  it  —  of  so  rare  a  snatch  at  op 
portunity  for  gapings  the  liveliest,  or  in  better 
terms  admirations  the  crudest,  that  I  could  have 
presumed  to  encumber  the  scene  with.  Scarce 
credible  to  me  now,  even  under  recall  of  my 
frustrations,  that  I  was  able  in  all  this  stretch  of 
time  to  respond  but  to  a  single  other  summons 
to  admire  at  any  cost,  which  I  think  must  have 
come  again  from  Readville,  and  the  occasion  of 
which,  that  of  my  brother's  assumed  adjutancy 
of  the  so  dramatically,  so  much  more  radically 
recruited  54th  involved  a  view  superficially  less 
harmonious.  The  whole  situation  was  more 
wound  up  and  girded  then,  the  formation  of 
negro  regiments  affected  us  as  a  tremendous  War 
measure,  and  I  have  glanced  in  another  place  at 


374    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

the  consequence  of  it  that  was  at  the  end  of  a 
few  months  most  pointedly  to  touch  ourselves. 
That  second  aspect  of  the  weeks  of  preparation 
before  the  departure  of  the  regiment  can  not  at 
all  have  suggested  a  frolic,  though  at  the  time 
I  don't  remember  it  as  grim,  and  can  only  gather 
that,  as  the  other  impression  had  been  of  some 
thing  quite  luminous  and  beautiful,  so  this  was 
vaguely  sinister  and  sad  —  perhaps  simply  through 
the  fact  that,  though  our  sympathies,  our  own 
as  a  family's,  were,  in  the  current  phrase,  all 
enlisted  on  behalf  of  the  race  that  had  sat  in 
bondage,  it  was  impossible  for  the  mustered 
presence  of  more  specimens  of  it,  and  of  stranger, 
than  I  had  ever  seen  together,  not  to  make  the 
young  men  who  were  about  to  lead  them  appear 
sacrificed  to  the  general  tragic  need  in  a  degree 
beyond  that  of  their  more  orthodox  appearances. 
The  air  of  sacrifice  was,  however,  so  to  brighten 
as  to  confound  itself  with  that  of  splendid  privi 
lege  on  the  day  (May  28th,  '63)  of  the  march  of  the 
54th  out  of  Boston,  its  fairest  of  young  com 
manders  at  its  head,  to  great  reverberations  of 
music,  of  fluttering  banners,  launched  benedic 
tions  and  every  public  sound;  only  from  that 
scene,  when  it  took  place,  I  had  to  be  helplessly 
absent  —  just  as  I  see  myself  in  a  like  dismal 
manner  deprived  of  any  nearness  of  view  of  my 
still  younger  brother's  military  metamorphosis 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    375 

and  contemporary  initiation.  I  vainly  question 
memory  for  some  such  picture  of  him,  at  this 
stage  of  his  adventure,  as  would  have  been 
certain  to  hang  itself,  for  reasons  of  wonder  and 
envy  again,  in  my  innermost  cabinet.  Our 
differently  compacted  and  more  variously  en 
dowed  Bob,  who  had  strained  much  at  every 
tether,  was  so  eager  and  ardent  that  it  made  for 
him  a  positive  authority;  but  what  most  recurs 
to  me  of  his  start  in  the  45th,  or  of  my  baffled 
vision  of  it,  is  the  marvel  of  our  not  having  all 
just  wept,  more  than  anything  else,  either  for 
his  being  so  absurdly  young  or  his  being  so 
absurdly  strenuous  —  we  might  have  had  our 
choice  of  pretexts  and  protests.  It  seemed  so 
short  a  time  since  he  had  been  Pingenieux  petit 
Robertson  of  the  domestic  schoolroom,  pairing 
with  our  small  sister  as  I  paired  with  Wilky.  We 
didn't  in  the  least  weep,  however  —  we  smiled  as 
over  the  interest  of  childhood  at  its  highest 
bloom,  and  that  my  parents,  with  their  consistent 
tenderness,  should  have  found  their  surrender  of 
their  latest  born  so  workable  is  doubtless  a  proof 
that  we  were  all  lifted  together  as  on  a  wave  that 
might  bear  us  where  it  would.  Our  ingenious 
Robertson  was  but  seventeen  years  old,  but  I 
suspect  his  ingenuity  of  having,  in  so  good  a 
cause,  anticipated  his  next  birthday  by  a  few 
months.  The  45th  was  a  nine-months  regiment, 


376    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

but  he  got  himself  passed  out  of  it,  in  advance 
of  its  discharge,  to  a  lieutenancy  in  the  55th 
U.S.C.T.,  Colonel  A.  P.  Hallowell  (transferred 
from  lieutenant-colonelcy  of  the  54th)  command 
ing;  though  not  before  he  had  been  involved  in 
the  siege  of  Charleston,  whence  the  visionary,  the 
quite  Edgar  Poeish  look,  for  my  entertainment, 
of  the  camp-covered  "Folly  Island"  of  his 
letters.  While  his  regiment  was  engaged  in 
Seymour's  raid  on  Florida  he  suffered  a  serious 
sunstroke,  with  such  consequences  that  he  was 
recommended  for  discharge;  of  which  he  de 
clined  to  avail  himself,  obtaining  instead  a 
position  on  General  Ames's  staff  and  enjoying 
thus  for  six  months  the  relief  of  being  mounted. 
But  he  returned  to  his  regiment  in  front  of 
Charleston  (after  service  with  the  Tenth  Army 
Corps,  part  of  the  Army  of  the  James,  before 
Petersburg  and  Richmond);  and  though  I  have 
too  scant  an  echo  of  his  letters  from  that  scene 
one  of  the  passages  that  I  do  recover  is  of  the 
happiest.  "It  was  when  the  line  wavered  and  I 
saw  Gen'l  HartwelPs  horse  on  my  right  rear  up 
with  a  shell  exploding  under  him  that  I  rammed 
my  spurs  into  my  own  beast,  who,  maddened 
with  pain,  carried  me  on  through  the  line,  throw 
ing  men  down,  and  over  the  Rebel  works  some 
distance  ahead  of  our  troops."  For  this  action 
he  was  breveted  captain;  and  the  55th,  later  on, 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    377 

was  the  first  body  of  troops  to  enter  Charleston 
and  march  through  its  streets  —  which  term  of 
his  experience,  as  it  unfolded,  presents  him  to 
my  memory  as  again  on  staff  duty;  with 
Brigadier-Generals  Potter,  Rufus  Hatch  and  his 
old  superior  and,  at  my  present  writing,  gallant 
and  vivid  survivor,  Alfred  Hartwell,  who  had 
been  his  captain  and  his  lieut. -colonel  in  the  45th 
and  the  55th  respectively.1 

1  My  youngest  brother's  ingenuity  was  to  know  as  little  rest  during 
much  of  his  life  as  his  strong  faculty  of  agitation  —  to  the  employment  of 
which  it  was  indeed  not  least  remarkably  applied.  Many  illustrations  of 
it  would  be  to  give,  had  I  more  margin;  and  not  one  of  them  anything  less 
than  striking,  thanks  to  the  vivacity  of  his  intelligence,  the  variety  ^of  his 
gifts  and  the  native  ability  in  which  he  was  himself  so  much  less  interested 
than  was  the  case  with  everyone  he  met,  however  casually,  that  he  be 
came,  many  years  before  his  death  in  1910,  our  one  gentleman  of  leisure: 
so  far  as  this  condition  might  consort  with  the  easiest  aptitude  for  ad 
mirable  talk,  charged  with  natural  life,  perception,  humour  and  colour,  that 
I  have  perhaps  ever  known.  There  were  times  when  Bob's  spoken  overflow 
struck  me  as  the  equivalent,  for  fine  animation,  of  William's  epistolary. 
The  note  of  the  ingenious  in  him  spent  itself  as  he  went,  but  I  find  an  echo 
of  one  of  its  many  incidents  in  the  passage  of  verse  that  I  am  here  moved 
to  rescue  from  undue  obscurity.  It  is  too  "amateurish"  and  has  too  many 
irregular  lines,  but  images  admirably  the  play  of  spirit  in  him  which  after 
ranging  through  much  misadventure  could  at  last  drop  to  an  almost  effec 
tive  grasp  of  the  happiest  relation. 

Although  I  lie  so  low  and  still 
Here  came  I  by  the  Master's  will; 
He  smote  at  last  to  make  me  free, 
As  He  was  smitten  on  the  tree 
And  nailed  there.     He  knew  of  old 
The  human  heart,  and  mine  is  cold; 
And  I  know  now  that  all  we  gain 
Until  we  come  to  Him  is  vain. 
Thy  hands  have  never  wrought  a  deed, 
Thy  heart  has  never  known  a  need, 
That  went  astray  in  His  great  plan 
Since  far-off  days  when  youth  began. 
For  in  that  vast  and  perfect  plan 
Where  time  is  but  an  empty  span 


378    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

I  can  at  all  events  speak  perfectly  of  my  own 
sense  of  the  uplifting  wave  just  alluded  to  during 
the  couple  of  years  that  the  "boys'"  letters  from 
the  field  came  in  to  us  —  with  the  one  abatement 
of  glamour  for  them  the  fact  that  so  much  of 
their  substance  was  in  the  whole  air  of  life  and 
their  young  reports  of  sharp  experience  but  a 
minor  pipe  in  the  huge  mixed  concert  always  in 
our  ears.  Faded  and  touching  pages,  these  letters 
are  in  some  abundance  before  me  now,  breath 
ing  confidence  and  extraordinary  cheer  —  though 
surviving  principally  but  in  Wilky's  admirable 

Our  Master  waits.     He  knows  our  want, 
We  know  not  his  —  till  pale  and  gaunt 
With  weariness  of  life  we  come 
And  say  to  Him,  What  shall  I  be? 
Oh  Master,  smite,  but  make  me  free 
Perchance  in  these  far  worlds  to  know 
The  better  thing  we  sought  to  be. 

And  then  upon  thy  couch  lie  down 

And  fold  the  hands  which  have  not  sown; 

And  as  thou  liest  there  alone 

Perhaps  some  breath  from  seraph  blown 

As  soft  as  dew  upon  the  rose 

Will  fall  upon  thee  at  life's  close. 

So  thou  wilt  say,  At  last,  at  last! 

All  pain  is  love  when  pain  is  past! 

And  to  the  Master  once  again: 

Oh  keep  my  heart  too  weak  to  pray; 

I  ask  no  longer  questions  vain 

Of  life  and  love,  of  loss  and  gain  — 

These  for  the  living  are  and  strong; 

I  go  to  Thee,  to  Thee  belong. 

Once  was  I  wakened  by  Thy  light, 

But  years  have  passed,  and  now  the  night 

Takes  me  to  Thee.     I  am  content; 

So  be  it  in  Thy  perfect  plan 

A  mansion  is  where  I  am  sent 

To  dwell  among  the  innocent. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    379 

hand,  of  all  those  I  knew  at  that  time  the  most 
humiliating  to  a  feebler  yet  elder  fist;  and  with 
their  liveliest  present  action  to  recompose  for  me 
not  by  any  means  so  much  the  scenes  and  cir 
cumstances,  the  passages  of  history  concerned, 
as  to  make  me  know  again  and  reinhabit  the 
places,  the  hours,  the  stilled  or  stirred  conditions 
through  which  I  took  them  in.  These  conditions 
seem  indeed  mostly  to  have  settled  for  me  into 
the  single  sense  of  what  I  missed,  compared  to 
what  the  authors  of  our  bulletins  gained,  in  f 
wondrous  opportunity  of  vision,  that  is  apprecia-  I 
tion  of  the  thing  seen  —  there  being  clearly  such 
a  lot  of  this,  and  all  of  it,  by  my  conviction, 
portentous  and  prodigious.  The  key  to  which 
assurance  was  that  I  longed  to  live  by  my  eyes, 
in  the  midst  of  such  far-spreading  chances,  in 
greater  measure  than  I  then  had  help  to,  and 
that  the  measure  in  which  they  had  it  gloriously 
overflowed.  This  capacity  in  them  to  deal  with 
such  an  afHuence  of  life  stood  out  from  every 
line,  and  images  sprung  up  about  them  at  every 
turn  of  the  story.  The  story,  the  general  one, 
of  the  great  surge  of  action  on  which  they  were 
so  early  carried,  was  to  take  still  other  turns 
during  the  years  I  now  speak  of,  some  of  these 
not  of  the  happiest;  but  with  the  same  relation 
to  it  on  my  own  part  too  depressingly  prolonged 
—  that  of  seeing,  sharing,  envying,  applauding, 


380    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

pitying,  all  from  too  far-off,  and  with  the  queer 
sense  that,  whether  or  no  they  would  prove  to 
have  had  the  time  of  their  lives,  it  seemed  that 
the  only  time  I  should  have  had  would  stand  or 
fall  by  theirs.  This  was  to  be  yet  more  deplorably 
the  case  later  on  —  I  like  to  give  a  twitch  to  the 
curtain  of  a  future  reduced  to  the  humility  of  a 
past:  when,  the  War  being  over  and  we  con 
fronted  with  all  the  personal  questions  it  had 
showily  muffled  up  only  to  make  them  step  forth 
with  their  sharper  angles  well  upon  us,  our 
father,  easily  beguiled,  acquired  by  purchase  and 
for  the  benefit  of  his  younger  sons  divers  cotton- 
lands  in  Florida;  which  scene  of  blighted  hopes 
it  perhaps  was  that  cast  upon  me,  at  its  defiant 
distance,  the  most  provoking  spell.  There  was 
provocation,  at  those  subsequent  seasons,  in  the 
very  place-name  of  Serenola,  beautiful  to  ear  and 
eye;  unforgettable  were  to  remain  the  times, 
while  the  vain  experiment  dragged  on  for  our 
anxiety  and  curiosity,  and  finally  to  our  great 
discomfiture,  when  my  still  ingenuous  young  broth 
ers,  occupied  in  raising  and  selling  crops  that 
refused  alike,  it  seemed,  to  come  and  to  go, 
wafted  northward  their  fluctuating  faith,  their 
constant  hospitality  and  above  all,  for  one  of 
the  number  at  home,  their  large  unconscious 
evocations.  The  mere  borrowed,  and  so  brokenly 
borrowed,  impression  of  southern  fields  basking 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    381 

in  a  light  we  didn't  know,  of  scented  sub-tropic 
nights,  of  a  situation  suffused  with  economic 
and  social  drama  of  the  strangest  and  sharpest, 
worked  in  me,  I  dare  say  most  deceptively,  as  a 
sign  of  material  wasted,  my  material  not  being 
in  the  least  the  crops  unproduced  or  unsold,  but 
the  precious  store  of  images  ungathered.  How 
ever,  the  vicarious  sensation  had,  as  I  say,  been 
intense  enough,  from  point  to  point,  before  that; 
a  series  of  Wilky's  letters  of  the  autumn  of  '62 
and  the  following  winter  during  operations  in 
North  Carolina  intended  apparently  to  clear  an 
approach  to  Charleston  overflow  with  the  vivacity 
of  his  interest  in  whatever  befell,  and  still  more  in 
whatever  promised,  and  reflect,  in  this  freshness 
of  young  assurances  and  young  delusions,  the 
general  public  fatuity.  The  thread  of  interest 
for  me  here  would  certainly  be  much  more  in  an 
exhibition  of  some  such  artless  notes  of  the  period, 
with  their  faded  marks  upon  them,  than  in  that 
of  the  spirit  of  my  own  poor  perusal  of  them  - 
were  it  not  that  those  things  shrink  after  years 
to  the  common  measure  when  not  testifying  to 
some  rarity  of  experience  and  expression.  All 
experience  in  the  field  struck  me  indeed  as  then 
rare,  and  I  wondered  at  both  my  brothers' 
military  mastery  of  statement,  through  which 
played,  on  the  part  of  the  elder,  a  whimsicality 
of  "turn,"  an  oddity  of  verbal  collocation,  that 


382    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

we  had  ever  cherished,  in  the  family  circle,  as 
the  sign  of  his  address.  "The  next  fight  we  have, 
I  expect,"  he  writes  from  Newberne,  N.  C.,  on 
New  Year's  Day  '63,  "will  be  a  pretty  big  one, 
but  I  am  confident  that  under  Foster  and  our 
gunboats  we  will  rid  the  State  of  these  miserable 
wretches  whom  the  Divine  Providence  has  created 
in  its  wisdom  to  make  men  wish  -  —  !  Send  on 
then,  open  yourselves  a  recruiting  establishment 
if  necessary  —  all  we  want  is  numbers!  They 
are  the  greatest  help  to  the  individual  soldier  on 
the  battle-field.  If  he  feels  he  has  30,000  men 
behind  him  pushing  on  steadily  to  back  him  he 
is  in  much  more  fighting  trim  than  when  away 
in  the  rear  with  10,000  ahead  of  him  fighting 
like  madmen.  It  seems  that  Halleck  told  Foster 
when  F.  was  in  Washington  that  he  scarcely 
slept  for  a  week  after  learning  that  we  were  near 
Goldsboro',  having  heard  previously  that  a  rein 
forcement  of  40,000  Rebels  were  coming  down 
there  to  whip  us.  Long  live  Foster!" 

"It  was  so  cold  this  morning,"  he  writes  at 
another  and  earlier  date,  "that  Divine  service 
was  held  in  our  barracks  instead  of  out-of-doors, 
as  it  generally  is,  and  it  was  the  most  impressive 
that  I  have  ever  heard.  The  sermon  was  on 
profanity,  and  the  chaplain,  after  making  all 
the  observations  and  doing  by  mouth  and  action 
as  much  as  he  could  to  rid  the  regiment  of  the 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    383 

curse,  sat  down,  credulous  being,  thinking  he 
had  settled  the  question  for  ever.  Colonel  Lee 
then  rose  and  said  that  the  chaplain  the  other 
day  accused  him  —  most  properly  —  of  profanity 
and  of  its  setting  a  very  bad  example  to  the 
regiment;  also  that  when  he  took  the  command 
he  had  felt  how  very  bad  the  thing  would  be  in 
its  influence  on  all  around  him.  He  felt  that  it 
would  be  the  great  conflict  of  his  life.  At  this 
point  his  head  drooped  and  he  lifted  his  handker 
chief  to  his  face;  but  he  went  on  in  conclusion: 
'Now  boys,  let  us  try  one  and  all  to  vindicate 
the  sublime  principles  our  chaplain  has  just  so 
eloquently  expressed,  and  I  will  do  my  best.  I 
hope  to  God  I  have  wounded  no  man's  feelings 
by  an  oath;  if  I  have  I  humbly  beg  his  pardon.' 
Here  he  finished."  How  this  passage  impressed 
me  at  the  time  signifies  little;  but  I  find  myself 
now  feel  in  its  illustration  of  what  could  then 
happen  among  soldiers  of  the  old  Puritan  Com 
monwealth  a  rich  recall  of  some  story  from 
Cromwellian  ranks.  Striking  the  continuity,  and 
not  unworthy  of  it  my  brother's  further  comment. 
"I  leave  you  to  imagine  which  of  these  appeals 
did  most  good,  the  conventional  address  of  the 
pastor  or  the  honest  manly  heart-touching  ac 
knowledgment  of  our  Colonel.  That  is  the  man 
through  and  through,  and  I  heard  myself  say 
afterwards:  'Let  him  swear  to  all  eternity  if 


384     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

he  is  that  sort  of  man,  and  if  profanity  makes 
such,  for  goodness'  sake  let  us  all  swear.'  This 
may  be  a  bad  doctrine,  but  is  one  that  might 
after  all  undergo  discussion."  From  which  letter 
I  cull  further:  "I  really  begin  to  think  you've 
been  hard  in  your  judgments  of  McClellan.  You 
don't  know  what  an  enemy  we  have  to  conquer. 
Every  secesh  I've  seen,  and  all  the  rebel  prisoners 
here,  talk  of  the  War  with  such  callous  earnest 
ness."  A  letter  from  Newberne  of  December 
2nd  contains  a  "pathetic"  record  of  momentary 
faith,  the  sort  so  abundant  at  the  time  in  what 
was  not  at  all  to  be  able  to  happen.  Moreover  a 
name  rings  out  of  it  which  it  is  a  kind  of  privilege 
to  give  again  to  the  air  —  when  one  can  do  so 
with  some  approach  to  an  association  signified; 
so  much  did  Charles  Lowell's  virtue  and  value 
and  death  represent  at  the  season  soon  to  come 
for  those  who  stood  within  sight  of  them,  and 
with  such  still  unextinct  emotion  may  the  few 
of  these  who  now  survive  turn  to  his  admira 
bly  inspired  kinsman's  Harvard  Commemoration 
Ode  and  find  it  infinitely  and  tenderly  suffused 
with  pride.  Two  gallantest  nephews,  particularly 
radiant  to  memory,  had  James  Russell  Lowell  to 
commemorate. 

I  sweep  for  them  a  paean,  but  they  wane 

Again  and  yet  again 
Into  a  dirge  and  die  away  in  pain. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    385 

In  these  brave  ranks  I  only  see  the  gaps, 
Thinking  of  dear  ones  whom  the  dumb  turf  wraps, 
Dark  to  the  triumph  which  they  died  to  gain. 

Cabot  has  had  news  that  Mr.  Amos  Lawrence  of 
Boston  is  getting  up  a  cavalry  regiment  (Wilky  writes), 
and  he  has  sent  home  to  try  for  a  commission  as  2nd 
lieutenant.  Now  if  we  could  only  both  get  such  a 
commission  in  that  regiment  you  can  judge  yourself 
how  desirable  it  would  be.  Perkins  will  probably  have 
one  in  the  Massachusetts  2nd  and  our  orderly  stands 
a  pretty  good  chance  of  one  in  the  44th.  This  cavalry 
colonelcy  will  probably  be  for  Cabot's  cousin,  Charles 
Lowell. 

There  is  a  report  that  we  start  this  week  for  Kinston, 
and  if  so  we  shall  doubtless  have  a  good  little  fight. 
We  have  just  received  2  new  Mass.  Regiments,  the 
8th  and  the  51st.  We  have  absolutely  no  time  to 
ourselves;  and  what  time  we  do  have  we  want  much 
more  to  give  to  lying  down  than  to  anything  else. 
But  try  your  best  for  me  now,  and  I  promise  you  to  do 
my  best  wherever  I  am. 

A  homelier  truth  is  in  a  few  lines  three  weeks 
later. 

The  men  as  a  general  thing  think  war  a  mean  piece 
of  business  as  it's  carried  on  in  this  State;  we  march 
20  or  30  miles  and  find  the  enemy  entrenched  in  rifle- 
pits  or  hidden  away  in  some  out-of-the-way  place;  we 
send  our  artillery  forward,  and  after  a  brisk  skirmish 
ahead  the  foe  is  driven  back  into  the  woods,  and  we 
march  on  for  20  miles  more  to  find  the  same  luck. 
We  were  all  on  the  last  march  praying  for  a  fight,  so 
that  we  might  halt  and  throw  off  our  knapsacks.  I 
don't  pretend  I  am  eager  to  make  friends  with  bullets, 


386    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

but  at  Whitehall,  after  marching  some  20  miles,  I 
was  on  this  account  really  glad  when  I  heard  can 
nonading  ahead  and  the  column  was  halted  and  the 
fight  began. 

The  details  of  this  engagement  are  missing 
from  the  letter,  but  we  found  matter  of  interest 
in  two  or  three  other  passages  —  one  in  particular 
recording  a  December  day's  march  with  15,000 
men,  "not  including  artillerymen,"  70  pieces  of 
artillery  and  1100  cavalry;  which,  "on  account 
of  obstructions  on  the  roads,"  had  achieved  by 
night  but  seventeen  miles  and  resulted  in  a 
bivouac  "in  3  immense  cotton-fields,  one  about 
as  large  as  Easton's  Pond  at  Newport." 

We  began  to  see  the  camp  fires  of  the  advance 
brigade  about  4  miles  ahead  of  us,  and  I  assure  you 
those  miles  were  soon  got  over.  I  think  Willy's  ar 
tistic  eye  would  have  enjoyed  the  sight  —  it  seemed  so 
as  if  the  world  were  on  fire.  When  we  arrived  on  the 
field  the  stacks  were  made,  the  ranks  broken  and  the 
men  sent  after  rail  fences,  which  fortunately  abound 
in  this  region  and  are  the  only  comfort  we  have  at 
night.  A  long  fire  is  made,  the  length  of  the  stacks, 
and  one  rank  is  placed  on  one  side  of  it  and  the  other 
opposite.  I  try  to  make  a  picture  you  see,  but  scratch 
it  out  in  despair.  The  fires  made,  we  sit  down  and 
make  our  coffee  in  our  tin  dippers,  and  often  is  one  of 
these  pushed  over  by  some  careless  wretch  who  hasn't 
noticed  it  on  the  coals  or  has  been  too  tired  to  look. 
The  coffee  and  the  hard  tack  consumed  we  spread  our 
rubber  blankets  and  sleep  as  sound  as  any  house  in 
Christendom.  At  about  5  the  fearful  reveille  calls  us 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    387 

to  our  feet,  we  make  more  coffee,  drink  it  in  a  hurry, 
sling  our  knapsacks  and  spank  down  the  road  in  one 
of  Foster's  regular  old  quicksteps. 

Thrilling  at  our  fireside  of  course  were  the  par 
ticulars  of  the  Kinston  engagement,  and  still  more, 
doubtless,  the  happy  freshness  of  the  writer. 

At  8  A.M.  we  were  on  the  road,  and  had  hardly 
marched  3  miles  when  we  knew  by  sounds  ahead 
that  the  ball  had  opened.  We  were  ordered  up  and 
deployed  in  an  open  field  on  the  right  of  the  road,  where 
we  remained  some  half  an  hour.  Then  we  were  moved 
some  hundred  yards  further,  but  resumed  our  former 
position  in  another  field.  Here  Foster  came  up  to  the 
Major,  who  was  directly  in  the  rear  of  our  company 
and  told  him  to  advance  our  left  wing  to  support  Mor 
rison's  battery,  which  was  about  half  a  mile  ahead. 
He  also  said  he  was  pressing  the  Rebs  hard  and  that 
they  were  retiring  at  every  shell  from  our  side.  On 
we  went,  the  left  flank  company  taking  the  lead,  and 
many  a  bullet  and  shell  whizzed  over  our  heads  in 
that  longest  half-mile  of  my  life.  We  seemed  to  be 
nearing  the  fun,  for  wounded  men  were  being  carried 
to  the  rear  and  dead  ones  lay  on  each  side  of  us  in  the 
woods.  We  were  taken  into  another  field  on  the  left 
of  the  road,  and  before  us  were  deployed  the  23rd 
Mass.,  who  were  firing  in  great  style.  First  we  were 
ordered  to  lie  down,  and  then  in  5  or  10  minutes  ordered 
up  again,  when  we  charged  down  that  field  in  a  manner 
creditable  to  any  Waterloo  legion.  I  felt  as  if  this 
moment  was  the  greatest  of  my  life  and  as  if  all  the 
devils  of  the  Inferno  were  my  benighted  system.  We 
halted  after  having  charged  some  60  yards,  when  what 
should  we  see  on  our  left,  just  out  of  the  woods  and 
stuck  up  on  a  rail,  but  a  flag  of  truce,  placing  under  its 


388    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

protecting  wing  some  50  or  60  poor  cowering  wretches 
who,  in  their  zeal  for  recognition,  not  only  pulled  out 
all  their  pocket  handkerchiefs,  but  in  the  case  of  one 
man  spread  out  his  white  shirt-flaps  and  offered  them 
pacifically  to  the  winds.  The  most  demonic  shouts 
and  yells  were  raised  by  the  23rd  ahead  of  us  at  this 
sight,  in  which  the  44th  joined;  while  the  regiments 
on  our  right,  and  that  of  the  road,  greeted  in  the  same 
frightful  manner  200  prisoners  they  had  cut  off  from 
retreat  by  the  bridge.  So  far  I  was  alive  and  the 
thing  had  lasted  perhaps  3  hours;  all  the  enemy  but 
the  200  just  named  had  got  away  over  the  bridge  to 
Kinston  and  our  cavalry  were  in  hot  pursuit.  I  don't 
think  Sergeant  G.  W.  has  ever  known  greater  glee  in 
all  his  born  days.  At  about  3  P.M.  we  crossed  the 
bridge  and  got  into  the  town.  All  along  the  road 
from  bridge  to  town  Rebel  equipments,  guns  and  car 
tridge-boxes  lay  thick,  and  within  the  place  dead  men 
and  horses  thickened  too.  We  were  taken  ahead 
through  the  town  to  support  the  New  York  3rd  Ar 
tillery  beyond,  where  it  was  shelling  the  woods  around 
and  ridding  the  place  for  the  night  of  any  troublesome 
wanderers.  The  Union  pickets  posted  out  ahead  that 
night  said  the  shrieks  of  women  and  children  further 
on  in  the  wood  could  be  heard  perfectly  all  night  long, 
these  unfortunates  having  taken  refuge  there  from  the 
threatened  town.  That  night  we  lived  like  fighting- 
cocks  —  molasses,  pork,  butter,  cheese  and  all  sorts  of 
different  delicacies  being  foraged  for  and  houses  en 
tered  regardless  of  the  commonest  dues  of  life,  and 
others  set  on  fire  to  show  Kinston  was  our  own.  She 
belonged  to  our  army,  and  almost  every  man  claimed 
a  house.  If  I  had  only  had  your  orders  beforehand  for 
trophies  I  could  have  satisfied  you  with  anything 
named,  from  a  gold  watch  to  an  old  brickbat.  This 
is  the  ugly  part  of  war.  A  too  victorious  army  soon 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    389 

goes  down;  but  we  luckily  didn't  have  time  for  big 
demoralisation,  as  the  next  day  in  the  afternoon  we 
found  ourselves  some  17  miles  away  and  bivouacking 
in  a  single  prodigious  cornfield. 

To  which  I  don't  resist  subjoining  another 
characteristic  passage  from  the  same  general 
scene  as  a  wind-up  to  that  small  chapter  of 
history. 

The  report  has  gained  ground  to-day  that  we  leave 
to-morrow,  and  if  so  I  suppose  the  next  three  months 
will  be  important  ones  in  the  history  of  the  War.  Four 
ironclads  and  a  great  many  gunboats  are  in  Beaufort 
Harbour;  we  have  at  present  a  force  of  50,000  infantry, 
an  immense  artillery  and  upwards  of  800  cavalry. 
Transports  innumerable  are  filling  up  every  spare  inch 
of  our  harbour,  and  every  man's  pity  and  charity  are 
exercised  upon  Charleston,  Mobile  or  Wilmington. 
We  are  the  only  nine-months  regiment  going,  a  fact 
which  to  the  sensitive  is  highly  gratifying,  showing 
Foster's  evident  high  opinion  of  us.  The  expedition, 
I  imagine,  will  be  pretty  interesting,  for  we  shall  have 
excitement  enough  without  the  fearful  marches.  To 
day  is  Sunday,  and  I've  been  reading  Hugo's  account 
of  Waterloo  in  Les  Miserables  and  preparing  my  mind 
for  something  of  the  same  sort  at  Wilmington.  God 
grant  the  battle  may  do  as  much  harm  to  the  Rebels 
as  Waterloo  did  to  the  French.  If  it  does  the  fight 
will  be  worth  the  dreadful  carnage  it  may  involve, 
and  the  experience  for  the  survivors  an  immense 
treasure.  Men  will  fight  forever  if  they  are  well 
treated.  Give  them  little  marching  and  keep  the 
wounded  away  from  them,  and  they'll  do  anything. 
I  am  very  well  and  in  capital  spirits,  though  now  and 


390    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

then  rather  blue  about  home.  But  only  5  months 
more  and  then  heaven !  General  Foster  has  just  issued 
an  order  permitting  us  to  inscribe  Goldsboro,  Kinston 
and  Whitehall  on  our  banner. 

On  the  discharge  of  the  44th  after  the  term  of 
nine  months  for  which  it  had  engaged  and  my 
brother's  return  home,  he  at  once  sought  service 
again  in  the  Massachusetts  54th,  his  connection 
with  which  I  have  already  recorded,  as  well  as 
his  injuries  in  the  assault  on  Fort  Wagner  fruit 
lessly  made  by  that  regiment  in  the  summer  of 
'63.  He  recovered  with  difficulty,  but  at  last 
sufficiently,  from  his  wounds  (with  one  effect 
of  which  he  had  for  the  rest  of  his  short  life 
grievously  to  reckon),  and  made  haste  to  rejoin 
his  regiment  in  the  field  -  -  to  the  promotion  of 
my  gathering  a  few  more  notes.  From  "off 
Graham's  point,  Tillapenny  River,  Headquarters 
2nd  Brigade,"  he  writes  in  December  '64. 

We  started  last  night  from  the  riflepits  in  the  front 
of  Deveaux  Neck  to  cross  the  Tillapenny  and  make  a 
reconnaissance  on  this  side  and  try  and  get  round  the 
enemy's  works.  It  is  now  half -past  10  A.M.,  and  I 
have  been  trying  to  wash  some  of  my  mud  off.  We 
are  all  a  sorry  crowd  of  beggars  —  I  don't  look  as  I 
did  the  night  we  left  home.  I  am  much  of  the  time 
mud  from  head  to  foot,  and  my  spirit  is  getting  mud 
dled  also.  But  I  am  in  excellent  condition  as  regards 
my  wounds  and  astonish  myself  by  my  powers.  I 
rode  some  26  miles  yesterday  and  walked  some  3  in 
thick  mud,  but  don't  feel  a  bit  the  worse  for  it.  We're 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    391 

only  waiting  here  an  hour  or  two  to  get  a  relief  of  horses, 
when  we  shall  start  again.  We  shan't  have  a  fight  of 
any  kind  to-day,  but  to-morrow  expect  to  give  them 
a  little  trouble  at  Pocotaligo.  Colonel  Hallowell 
commands  this  reconnaissance.  We  have  only  4 
regiments  and  a  section  of  artillery  from  the  2nd 
Brigade  with  us.  We  heard  some  fine  music  from  the 
Rebel  lines  yesterday.  They  have  got  a  stunning  band 
over  there.  Prisoners  tell  us  it's  a  militia  band  from 
Georgia.  Most  all  the  troops  in  our  front  are  militia 
composed  of  old  men  and  boys,  the  flower  of  the 
chivalry  being  just  now  engaged  with  Sherman  at 
Savannah.  We  hear  very  heavy  firing  in  that  direc 
tion  this  morning,  and  I  guess  the  chivalry  is  getting 
the  worst  of  it.  The  taking  of  Fort  McAllister  the 
other  day  was  a  splendid  thing  —  we  got  280  prisoners 
and  made  them  go  out  and  pick  up  the  torpedoes 
round  the  fort.  Sherman  was  up  at  Oguchee  and 
Ossahaw  yesterday  on  another  consultation  with 
Foster.  We  had  called  our  whole  army  out  the  night 
before  in  front  of  our  works  to  give  him  three  cheers. 
This  had  a  marvellous  effect  upon  the  Rebs.  About 
20  men  came  in  the  night  into  our  lines,  thinking  we 
had  got  reinforcements  and  were  going  to  advance. 
Later.  A  scout  has  just  come  in  and  tells  us  the  enemy 
are  intrenched  about  4  miles  off,  so  that  we  shall 
have  to-day  a  shindy  of  some  kind.  Our  headquarters 
are  now  in  a  large  house  once  owned  by  Judge  Graham. 
The  coloured  troops  are  in  high  spirits  and  have  done 
splendidly  this  campaign. 
i 

The  high  spirits  of  the  coloured  troops  appear 
naturally  to  have  been  shared  by  their  officers  — 
"in  the  field,  Tillapenny  River,"  late  at  night  on 
December  23rd,  '64. 


392    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

We  have  just  received  such  bully  news  to  comfort 
us  that  I  can't  help  rising  from  my  slumbers  to  drop 
you  a  line.  A  despatch  just  received  tells  us  that 
Sherman  has  captured  150  guns,  250,000  dols.  worth 
of  cotton  at  Savannah,  that  Forrest  is  killed  and 
routed  by  Rousseau,  and  that  Thomas  has  walked  into 
Hood  and  given  him  the  worst  kind  of  fits.  I  imagine 
the  poor  Rebel  outposts  in  our  front  feel  pretty  blue 
to-night,  for  what  with  that  and  the  thermometer  at 
about  zero  I  guess  the  night  won't  pass  without  rob 
bing  their  army  of  some  of  its  best  and  bravest.  We 
suffer  a  good  deal  from  the  cold,  but  are  now  sitting 
round  our  camp  fire  in  as  good  spirits  as  men  could 
possibly  be.  A  despatch  received  early  this  evening 
tells  us  to  look  out  sharp  for  Hardee,  but  this  latest 
news  knocks  that  to  a  cocked  hat,  and  we  are  only  just 
remembering  that  that  gentleman  is  round.  My  foot 
is  bully. 

As  regards  that  impaired  member,  on  which 
he  was  ever  afterwards  considerably  to  limp,  he 
opines  three  days  later,  on  Christmas  evening, 
that  "even  in  the  palmy  days  of  old  it  never 
felt  better  than  now."  And  he  goes  on: 

Though  Savannah  is  taken  I  fear  we  shan't  get  much 
credit  for  having  helped  to  take  it.  Yet  night  and 
day  we  have  been  at  it  hammer  and  tongs,  and  as  we 
are  away  from  the  main  army  and  somewhat  isolated 
and  cut  off  our  work  has  been  pretty  hard.  We  have 
had  only  1,200  effective  men  in  our  brigade,  and  out 
of  that  number  have  had  regularly  400  on  picket 
night  and  day,  and  the  fatigue  and  extra  guard  duty 
have  nearly  used  them  up.  Twice  we  have  been  at 
tacked  and  both  times  held  our  own.  Twice  we  at- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    393 

tacked  and  once  have  been  driven.  The  only  pris 
oners  we  have  captured  on  the  whole  expedition  have 
been  taken  by  this  part  of  the  column,  and  on  the 
whole  though  we  didn't  march  into  Savannah  I  know 
you  will  give  us  a  little  credit  for  having  hastened  its 
downfall.  Three  prisoners  that  we  took  the  other 
night  slept  at  our  Hdqrs,  and  we  had  a  good  long  talk 
with  them.  We  could  get  out  of  them  nothing  at  all 
that  helps  from  a  military  point  of  view,  but  their 
stories  about  the  Confederacy  were  most  hopeless. 
They  were  3  officers  and  gentlemen  of  a  crack  S.C. 
cavalry  company  which  has  been  used  during  the 
War  simply  to  guard  this  coast,  and  their  language 
and  state  of  mind  were  those  of  the  true  Southern 
chevalier.  They  confessed  to  a  great  scare  on  finding 
themselves  hemmed  in  by  coloured  troops,  and  all 
agree  that  the  niggers  are  the  worst  enemies  they  have 
had  to  face.  On  Thursday  we  turned  them  over  to 
the  Provost-Marshal  at  Deveaux  Neck,  who  took 
them  to  Gen'l  Hatch.  The  General  had  got  our 
despatch  announcing  we  could  get  nothing  at  all  out 
of  them,  and  he  came  down  on  them  most  ruthlessly 
and  told  them  to  draw  lots,  as  one  would  have  to  swing 
before  night.  He  told  them  he  had  got  the  affidavit 
of  an  escaped  Union  prisoner,  a  man  captured  at  Honey 
Hill  and  who  had  come  into  our  lines  the  day  previous, 
to  the  effect  that  he  had  witnessed  the  hanging  of  a 
negro  soldier  belonging  to  the  26th  U.S.C.T.,  and  that 
he  had  determined  one  of  them  should  answer  for  it. 
Two  seemed  very  much  moved,  but  the  third,  Lee  by 
name  (cousin  of  Gen'l  Stephen  Lee  of  the  cavalry), 
said  he  knew  nothing  about  it,  but  if  it  was  so,  so  it 
might  be.  The  other  two  were  taken  from  each  other 
and  Gen'l  Hatch  managed  to  draw  a  good  deal  of  in 
formation  from  them  about  our  position,  that  is  the 
force  and  nature  of  the  enemy  and  works  in  our  front. 


394    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

Lee  refused  to  the  last  to  answer  any  question  what 
ever,  and  they  all  3  now  await  at  Hilton  Head  the 
issue  of  the  law.  The  hanging  of  the  negro  seems  a 
perfectly  ascertained  fact  —  he  was  hung  by  the  48th 
Georgia  Infty,  and  the  story  has  naturally  much 
stirred  up  our  coloured  troops.  If  Hardee  should  de 
cide  to  come  down  on  us  I  believe  he  would  get  the 
worst  of  it,  and  only  hope  now  that  our  men  won't 
take  a  prisoner  alive.  They  certainly  make  a  great 
mistake  at  Washington  in  not  attending  to  these  little 
matters,  and  I  am  sure  the  moral  effect  of  an  order 
from  the  President  announcing  that  such  things  have 
happened,  and  that  the  coloured  troops  have  taken 
them  thoroughly  to  heart,  would  be  greater  on  the 
Rebels  than  any  physical  blow  we  can  deal  them. 

When  I  read  again,  "in  the  field  before  Poco- 
taligo,"  toward  the  middle  of  January  '65,  that 
"Sherman  leaves  to-night  from  Beaufort  with 
Logan's  Corps  to  cross  Beaufort  Ferry  and  come 
up  on  our  right  flank  and  push  on  to  Pocotaligo 
bridge,"  the  stir  as  from  great  things  rises  again 
for  me,  wraps  about  Sherman's  name  as  with 
the  huge  hum  that  then  surrounded  it,  and  in 
short  makes  me  give  the  passage  such  honour  as 
I  may.  "We  are  waiting  anxiously  for  the 
sound  of  his  musketry  announcing  him."  I  was 
never  in  my  life  to  wait  for  any  such  sound,  but 
how  at  that  juncture  I  hung  about  with  privileged 
Wilky!  "We  all  propose  at  Hdqrs  to  take  our 
stores  out  and  ride  up  to  the  bank  of  the  river 
and  watch  the  fight  on  the  other  side.  We  are 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    395 

praying  to  be  relieved  here  —  our  men  are  dying 
for  want  of  clothing;  and  when  we  see  Morris 
Island  again  we  shall  utterly  rejoice."  He  writes 
three  days  later  from  headquarters  established 
in  a  plantation  the  name  of  which,  as  well  as  that 
of  the  stream,  of  whatever  magnitude,  that  they 
had  crossed  to  reach  it,  happens  to  be  marked  by 
an  illegibility  quite  unprecedented  in  his  splendid 
script  —  to  the  effect  of  a  still  intenser  evocation 
(as  was  then  to  be  felt  at  any  rate)  of  all  the 
bignesses  involved.  "Sherman's  whole  army  is 
in  our  front,  and  they  expect  to  move  on  Charles 
ton  at  any  moment."  Sherman's  whole  army!  - 
it  affected  me  from  afar  off  as  a  vast  epic  vision. 
The  old  vibration  lives  again,  but  with  it  also 
that  of  the  smaller  and  nearer,  the  more  intimate 
notes  —  such  for  instance  as:  "I  shall  go  up  to 
the  20th  Corps  to-morrow  and  try  for  a  sight  of 
Billy  Perkins  and  Sam  Storrow  in  the  2nd  Mass." 
Into  which  I  somehow  read,  under  the  touch 
of  a  ghostly  hand  no  more  "weirdly"  laid 
than  that,  more  volumes  than  I  can  the  least 
account  for  or  than  I  have  doubtless  any 
business  to. 

My  visionary  yearning  must  however,  I  think, 
have  drawn  most  to  feed  on  from  the  first  of 
a  series  of  missives  dated  from  Headquarters, 
Department  of  the  South,  Hilton  Head  S.C.,  this 
particular  one  of  the  middle  of  February.  "I 


396    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

write  in  a  great  hurry  to  tell  you  I  have  been 
placed  on  General  Gillmore's  staff  as  A.D.C.  It 
is  just  the  very  thing  for  my  foot  under  present 
circumstances,  and  I  consider  myself  most  for 
tunate.  I  greatly  like  the  General,  who  is  most 
kind  and  genial  and  very  considerate.  My  duties 
will  be  principally  the  carrying  of  orders  to 
Savannah,  Morris  Island,  Fortress  Monroe,  Com- 
balee  (?)  Florida,  and  the  General's  correspon 
dence.  Charleston  is  ours,"  he  goes  on  two  days 
later:  "it  surrendered  to  a  negro  regiment 
yesterday  at  9  A.M.  We  have  just  come  up  from 
Sumter,  where  we  have  hoisted  the  American 
flag.  We  were  lying  off  Bull's  Bay  yesterday 
noon  waiting  for  this  when  the  General  saw 
through  his  glass  the  stars  and  stripes  suddenly 
flown  from  the  town  hall.  We  immediately 
steamed  up  to  Sumter  and  ran  up  the  colours 
there.  Old  Gillmore  was  in  fine  feather  and  I 
am  in  consummate  joy."  The  joy  nevertheless, 
I  may  add,  doesn't  prevent  the  remark  after  a 
couple  of  days  more  that  "Charleston  isn't  on 
the  whole  such  a  very  great  material  victory; 
in  fact  the  capture  of  the  place  is  of  value  only 
in  that  its  moral  effect  tends  to  strengthen  the 
Union  cause."  After  which  he  proceeds: 

Governor  Aiken  of  S.C.  came  up  to  Hdqrs  to-day 
to  call  on  the  Gen'l,  and  they  had  a  long  talk.  He  is  a 
"gradual  Emancipationist"  and  says  the  worst  of  the 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    397 

President's  acts  was  his  sweeping  Proclamation.  Be 
fore  that  every  one  in  this  State  was  ready  to  come  back 
on  the  gradual  system,  and  would  have  done  so  if 
Lincoln's  act  hadn't  driven  them  to  madness.  This  is 
all  fine  talk,  but  there  is  nothing  in  it.  They  had  at 
least  5  months'  warning  and  could  have  in  that  time 
perfectly  returned  within  the  fold;  in  fact  the  strong 
Abolitionists  of  the  North  were  afraid  the  President 
had  made  the  thing  but  too  easy  for  them  and  that 
they  would  get  ahead  of  us  and  themselves  emancipate. 
This  poor  gentleman  is  simple  crazy  and  weakminded. 
Between  Davis  and  us  he  is  puzzled  beyond  measure, 
and  doesn't  know  what  line  to  take.  One  thing 
though  troubled  him  most,  namely  the  ingratitude  of 
the  negro.  He  can't  conceive  how  the  creatures  he 
has  treated  with  such  extraordinary  kindness  and 
taken  such  care  of  should  all  be  willing  to  leave  him. 
He  says  he  was  the  first  man  in  the  South  to  intro 
duce  religion  among  the  blacks  and  that  his  plantation 
of  600  of  them  was  a  model  of  civilisation  and  peace. 
Just  think  of  this  immense  slaveholder  telling  me  as  I 
drove  him  home  that  the  coat  he  had  on  had  been 
turned  three  times  and  his  pantaloons  the  only  ones 
he  possessed.  He  stated  this  so  simply  and  touchingly 
that  I  couldn't  help  offering  him  a  pair  of  mine  —  which 
he  refused,  however.  There  are  some  10,000  people 
in  the  town,  mostly  women  and  negroes,  and  it's  tre 
mendously  ravaged  by  our  shell,  about  which  they 
have  naturally  lied  from  beginning  to  end. 

"Bob  has  just  come  down  from  Charleston," 
he  writes  in  March  —  "he  has  been  commissioned 
captain  in  the  103rd  TJ.S.C.T.  I  am  sorry  he 
has  left  his  regiment,  still  he  seemed  bent  on 
doing  so  and  offers  all  kinds  of  reasons  for  it. 


398    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

He  may  judge  rightly,  but  I  fear  he's  hasty;'' 
and  indeed  this  might  appear  from  a  glimpse 
of  our  younger  brother  at  his  ease  given  by  him 
in  a  letter  of  some  days  before,  written  at  two 
o'clock  in  the  morning  and  recording  a  day  spent 
in  a  somewhat  arduously  performed  visit  to 
Charleston.  "I  drove  out  to  the  entrenchments 
to-day  to  see  B.,  and  found  him  with  Hartwell 
(R.  J.'s  colonel)  smoking  their  long  pipes  on  the 
verandah  of  a  neat  country  cottage  with  a 
beautiful  garden  in  front  of  them  and  the  birds 
chirping  and  rambling  around.  Bob  looks  re 
markably  well  and  seemed  very  nice  indeed.  He 
speaks  very  highly  of  Hartwell,  and  the  latter 
the  same  of  him.  They  seemed  settled  in  remark 
able  comfort  at  Charleston  and  to  be  taking  life 
easy  after  their  180  miles  march  through  South 
Carolina."  He  mentions  further  that  his  visit 
to  the  captured  city,  begun  the  previous  day, 
had  been  made  in  interesting  conditions;  there 
is  in  fact  matter  for  quotation  throughout  the 
letter,  the  last  of  the  small  group  from  which  I 
shall  borrow.  He  had,  with  his  general,  accom 
panied  a  "  large  Senatorial  delegation  from 
Washington  and  shown  them  round  the  place." 
He  records  the  delegation's  "delight"  in  what 
they  saw;  how  "a  large  crowd  of  young  ladies" 
were  of  the  party,  so  that  the  Senatorial  presences 
were  "somewhat  relieved  and  lightened  to  the 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    399 

members  of  the  staff;"  and  also  that  they  all 
went  over  to  Forts  Sumter  and  Moultrie  and 
the  adjacent  works.  The  pleasure  of  the  whole 
company  in  the  scene  of  desolation  thus  presented 
is  one  of  those  ingenuous  historic  strokes  that 
the  time-spirit,  after  a  sufficient  interval,  permits 
itself  to  smile  at  —  and  is  not  the  only  such,  it 
may  be  noted,  in  the  sincere  young  statement. 

To-morrow  they  go  to  Savannah,  returning  here  in 
the  evening,  when  there  is  to  be  a  grand  reception  for 
them  at  Hdqrs.  We  expect  Gen'l  Robert  Anderson 
(the  loyalist  commandant  at  Sumter  when  originally 
fired  upon)  by  the  next  steamer,  with  Gideon  Welles 
(secretary  of  the  Navy)  and  a  number  of  other  notables 
from  Washington.  Anderson  is  going  to  raise  the  old 
flag  on  Sumter,  and  of  course  there  will  be  a  great 
shindy  here  —  I  only  wish  you  were  with  us  to  join 
in  it.  I  never  go  to  Sumter  without  the  deepest  ex 
hilaration  —  so  many  scenes  come  to  my  mind.  It's 
the  centre  of  the  nest,  and  for  one  to  be  there  is  to 
feel  that  the  whole  game  is  up.  These  people  have 
always  insisted  that  there  the  last  gun  should  be  fired. 
But  the  suffering  and  desolation  of  this  land  is  the 
worst  feature  of  the  whole  thing.  If  you  could  see 
what  they  are  reduced  to  you  couldn't  help  being 
touched.  The  best  people  are  in  utter  penury;  they 
look  like  the  poorest  of  the  poor  and  they  talk  like 
them  also.  They  are  deeply  demoralised,  in  fact  de 
graded.  Charleston  is  more  forsaken  and  stricken 
than  I  can  describe;  it  reminds  me  when  I  go  through 
the  streets  of  some  old  doomed  city  on  which  the 
wrath  of  God  has  rested  from  far  back,  and  if  it  ever 
revives  will  do  so  simply  through  the  infinite  mercy 


400    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

and  charity  of  the  North.  But  for  this  generation  at 
least  the  inhabitants  are  done  for.  Can't  H.  come 
down  and  pay  us  a  visit  of  2  or  3  weeks?  I  can  get 
him  a  War  Dept.  pass  approved  by  General  Gillmore. 

H.  knew  and  well  remembers  the  pang  of  his 
inability  to  accept  this  invitation,  to  the  value 
of  which  for  emphasis  of  tragic  life  on  the  scene 
of  the  great  drama  the  next  passage  adds  a  touch. 
Mrs.  William  Young,  the  lady  alluded  to,  was  a 
friend  we  had  known  almost  only  on  the  European 
stage  and  amid  the  bright  associations  of  Paris 
in  particular.  Whom  did  we  suppose  he  had 
met  on  the  arrival  of  a  steamer  from  the  North 
but  this  more  or  less  distracted  acquaintance  of 
other  days?  —  who  had  come  down  "to  try  and 
get  her  stepmother  into  our  lines  and  take  her 
home.  She  is  accompanied  by  a  friend  from 
New  York,  and  expects  to  succeed  in  her  under 
taking.  I  hardly  think  she  will,  however,  as 
her  mother  is  90  miles  out  of  our  lines  and  a  very 
old  woman.  We  have  sent  a  negro  out  to  give 
her  Mrs.  Young's  news,  but  how  can  this  poor 
old  thing  travel  such  a  distance  on  foot  and  sleep 
in  the  swamp  besides?  It's  an  absurd  idea,  but 
I  shall  do  everything  in  my  power  to  facilitate 
it."  Of  what  further  befell  I  gather  no  account; 
but  I  remember  how  a  later  time  was  to  cause 
me  to  remark  on  the  manner  in  which  even  dire 
tragedy  may  lapse,  in  the  individual  life,  and  leave 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    401 

no  trace  on  the  ground  it  has  ravaged  —  none 
at  least  apparent  unless  pushingly  searched  for. 
The  last  thing  to  infer  from  appearances,  on 
much  subsequent  renewal  of  contact  with  Mrs. 
Young  in  Paris  again,  was  that  this  tension  of  a 
reach  forth  across  great  war-wasted  and  swamp- 
smothered  spaces  for  recovery  of  an  aged  and 
half-starved  pedestrian  female  relative  counted 
for  her  as  a  chapter  of  experience:  the  experience 
of  Paris  dressmakers  and  other  like  matters  had 
so  revived  and  supervened.  But  let  me  add  that 
I  speak  here  of  mere  appearances,  and  have  ever 
inclined  to  the  more  ironic  and  more  complicating 
vision  of  them.  It  would  doubtless  have  been 
too  simple  for  wonder  that  our  elegant  friend 
should  have  lived,  as  it  were,  under  the  cloud  of 
reminiscence  —  and  wonder  had  always  some 
where  to  come  in. 


XII 

IT  had  been,  however,  neither  at  Newport  nor 
at  Cambridge  —  the  Cambridge  at  least  of 
that  single  year  —  that  the  plot  began  most 
to  thicken  for  me:  I  figure  it  as  a  sudden  stride 
into  conditions  of  a  sort  to  minister  and  inspire 
much  more,  all  round,  that  we  early  in  1864  mi 
grated,  as  a  family,  to  Boston,  and  that  I  now 
seem  to  see  the  scene  of  our  existence  there  for 
a  couple  of  years  packed  with  drama  of  a  finer 
consistency  than  any  I  had  yet  tasted.  We 
settled  for  the  interesting  time  in  Ashburton 
Place  —  the  "sympathetic"  old  house  we  oc 
cupied,  one  of  a  pair  of  tallish  brick  fronts  based, 
as  to  its  ground  floor,  upon  the  dignity  of  time- 
darkened  granite,  was  lately  swept  away  in  the  in 
terest  of  I  know  not  what  grander  cause;  and 
when  I  wish  to  think  of  such  intercourse  as  I  have 
enjoyed  with  the  good  city  at  its  closest  and,  as 
who  should  say  its  kindest,  though  this  comes 
doubtless  but  to  saying  at  its  freshest,  I  live  over 
again  the  story  of  that  sojourn,  a  period  bristling, 
while  I  recover  my  sense  of  it,  with  an  unprece 
dented  number  of  simultaneous  particulars.  To 
stick,  as  I  can  only  do,  to  the  point  from  which  my 

402 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    403 

own  young  outlook  worked,  the  things  going  on 
for  me  so  tremendously  all  at  once  were  in  the 
first  place  the  last  impressions  of  the  War,  a  whole 
social  relation  to  it  crowding  upon  us  there  as  for 
many  reasons,  all  of  the  best,  it  couldn't  have 
done  elsewhere;  and  then,  more  personally  speak 
ing,  the  prodigious  little  assurance  I  found  myself 
gathering  as  from  one  day  to  another  that 
fortune  had  in  store  some  response  to  my  deeply 
reserved  but  quite  unabashed  design  of  becom 
ing  as  "literary"  as  might  be.  It  was  as  if,  our 
whole  new  medium  of  existence  aiding,  I  had 
begun  to  see  much  further  into  the  question  of 
how  that  end  was  gained.  The  vision,  quickened 
by  a  wealth,  a  great  mixture,  of  new  appearances, 
became  such  a  throbbing  affair  that  my  memory 
of  the  time  from  the  spring  of  '64  to  the  autumn 
of  '66  moves  as  through  an  apartment  hung  with 
garlands  and  lights  —  where  I  have  but  to  breathe 
for  an  instant  on  the  flowers  again  to  see  them 
flush  with  colour,  and  but  tenderly  to  snuff  the  . 
candles  to  see  them  twinkle  afresh.  Things  j 
happened,  and  happened  repeatedly,  the  mere 
brush  or  side-wind  of  which  was  the  stir  of  life; 
and  the  fact  that  I  see,  when  I  consider,  how  it 
was  mostly  the  mere  side-wind  I  got,  doesn't  draw 
from  the  picture  a  shade  of  its  virtue.  I  literally, 
and  under  whatever  felt  restriction  of  my  power 
to  knock  about,  formed  independent  relations  — 


404    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

several;  and  two  or  three  of  them,  as  I  then 
thought,  of  the  very  most  momentous.  I  may 
not  attempt  just  here  to  go  far  into  these,  save 
for  the  exception  of  the  easiest  to  treat,  which  I 
also,  by  good  fortune,  win  back  as  by  no  means 
the  least  absorbing  —  the  beautiful,  the  entrancing 
presumption  that  I  should  have  but  to  write  with 
sufficient  difficulty  and  sufficient  felicity  to  get 
once  for  all  (that  was  the  point)  into  the  incredi 
bility  of  print.  I  see  before  me,  in  the  rich,  the 
many-hued  light  of  my  room  that  overhung  dear 
Ashburton  Place  from  our  third  floor,  the  very 
greenbacks,  to  the  total  value  of  twelve  dollars, 
into  which  I  had  changed  the  cheque  representing 
my  first  earned  wage.  I  had  earned  it,  I  couldn't 
but  feel,  with  fabulous  felicity:  a  circumstance 
so  strangely  mixed  with  the  fact  that  literary 
composition  of  a  high  order  had,  at  that  very 
table  where  the  greenbacks  were  spread  out, 
quite  viciously  declined,  and  with  the  air  of  its 
being  also  once  for  all,  to  "come"  on  any  save 
its  own  essential  terms,  which  it  seemed  to 
distinguish  in  the  most  invidious  manner  con 
ceivable  from  mine.  It  was  to  insist  through  all 
my  course  on  this  distinction,  and  sordid  gain 
thereby  never  again  to  seem  so  easy  as  in  that 
prime  handling  of  my  fee.  Other  guerdons,  of 
the  same  queer,  the  same  often  rather  greasy, 
complexion  followed;  for  what  had  I  done,  to 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    405 

the  accompaniment  of  a  thrill  the  most  ineffable, 
an  agitation  that,  as  I  recapture  it,  affects  me  as 
never  exceeded  in  all  my  life  for  fineness,  but  go 
one  beautiful  morning  out  to  Shady  Hill  at 
Cambridge  and  there  drink  to  the  lees  the  offered 
cup  of  editorial  sweetness?  —  none  ever  again  to 
be  more  delicately  mixed.  I  had  addressed  in 
trembling  hope  my  first  fond  attempt  at  literary 
criticism  to  Charles  Eliot  Norton,  who  had  lately, 
and  with  the  highest,  brightest  competence,  come 
to  the  rescue  of  the  North  American  Review, 
submerged  in  a  stale  tradition  and  gasping  for 
life,  and  he  had  not  only  published  it  in  his  very 
next  number  —  the  interval  for  me  of  breathless 
brevity  -  -  but  had  expressed  the  liveliest  further 
hospitality,  the  gage  of  which  was  thus  at  once 
his  welcome  to  me  at  home.  I  was  to  grow  fond 
of  regarding  as  a  positive  consecration  to  letters 
that  half -hour  in  the  long  library  at  Shady  Hill, 
where  the  winter  sunshine  touched  serene  book 
shelves  and  arrayed  pictures,  the  whole  em 
browned  composition  of  objects  in  my  view,  with 
I  knew  not  what  golden  light  of  promise,  what 
assurance  of  things  to  come:  there  was  to  be 
nothing  exactly  like  it  later  on  -  -  the  conditions 
of  perfect  Tightness  for  a  certain  fresh  felicity, 
certain  decisive  pressures  of  the  spring,  can  occur, 
it  would  seem,  but  once.  This  was  on  the  other 
hand  the  beginning  of  so  many  intentions  that  it 


406    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

mattered  little  if  the  particular  occasion  was  not 
repeated;  for  what  did  I  do  again  and  again, 
through  all  the  years,  but  handle  in  plenty  what 
I  might  have  called  the  small  change  of  it? 

I  despair,  however,  as  I  look  back,  of  rendering 
the  fusions  in  that  much-mixed  little  time,  every 
feature  of  which  had  something  of  the  quality 
and  interest  of  every  other,  and  the  more  salient, 
the  more  "epoch-making"  — I  apply  with  com 
placency  the  portentous  term  —  to  drape  them 
selves  romantically  in  the  purple  folds  of  the 
whole.  I  think  it  must  have  been  the  sense  of 
the  various  climaxes,  the  enjoyed,  because  so 
long  postponed,  revenges  of  the  War,  that  lifted 
the  moment  in  the  largest  embrace:  the  general 
consciousness  was  of  such  big  things  at  last  in 
sight,  the  huge  national  emergence,  the  widening 
assurance,  however  overdarkened,  it  is  true, 
by  the  vast  black  cost  of  what  General  Grant  (no 
light-handed  artist  he!)  was  doing  for  us.  He 
was  at  all  events  working  to  an  end,  and  some 
thing  strange  and  immense,  even  like  the  light 
of  a  new  day  rising  above  a  definite  rim,  shot  its 
rays  through  the  chinks  of  the  immediate,  the 
high-piled  screen  of  sacrifice  behind  which  he 
wrought.  I  fail  to  seize  again,  to  my  wonder, 
the  particular  scene  of  our  acclamation  of  Lee's 
surrender,  but  I  feel  in  the  air  the  exhalation  of 
our  relief,  which  mingled,  near  and  far,  with  the 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    407 

breath  of  the  springtime  itself  and  positively 
seemed  to  become  over  the  land,  over  the  world 
at  large  in  fact,  an  element  of  reviving  Nature. 
Sensible  again  are  certain  other  sharpest  vibra 
tions  then  communicated  from  the  public  con 
sciousness:  Ashburton  Place  resounds  for  me 
with  a  wild  cry,  rocks  as  from  a  convulsed  breast, 
on  that  early  morning  of  our  news  of  Lincoln's 
death  by  murder;  and,  in  a  different  order,  but 
also  darkening  the  early  day,  there  associates 
itself  with  my  cherished  chamber  of  application 
the  fact  that  of  a  sudden,  and  while  we  were 
always  and  as  much  as  ever  awaiting  him, 
Hawthorne  was  dead.  What  I  have  called  the 
fusion  strikes  me  as  indeed  beyond  any  rendering 
when  I  think  of  the  peculiar  assault  on  my 
private  consciousness  of  that  news:  I  sit  once 
more,  half-dressed,  late  of  a  summer  morning  and 
in  a  bedimmed  light  which  is  somehow  at  once 
that  of  dear  old  green  American  shutters  drawn 
to  against  openest  windows  and  that  of  a  moral 
shadow  projected  as  with  violence  —  I  sit  on  my 
belated  bed,  I  say,  and  yield  to  the  pang  that 
made  me  positively  and  loyally  cry.  I  didn't 
rise  early  in  those  days  of  scant  ease  —  I  now  even 
ask  myself  how  sometimes  I  rose  at  all;  which 
ungrudged  license  withal,  I  thus  make  out,  was 
not  less  blessedly  effective  in  the  harmony  I 
glance  at  than  several  showier  facts.  To  tell  at 


408    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

all  adequately  why  the  pang  was  fine  would 
nevertheless  too  closely  involve  my  going  back, 
as  we  have  learned  to  say,  on  the  whole  rich 
interpenetration.  I  fondly  felt  it  in  those  days 
invaluable  that  I  had  during  certain  last  and 
otherwise  rather  blank  months  at  Newport  taken 
in  for  the  first  time  and  at  one  straight  draught 
the  full  sweet  sense  of  our  one  fine  romancer's 
work  —  for  sweet  it  then  above  all  seemed  to  me ; 
and  I  remember  well  how,  while  the  process  day 
after  day  drew  itself  admirably  out,  I  found  the 
actual  exquisite  taste  of  it,  the  strain  of  the 
revelation,  justify  up  to  the  notch  whatever  had 
been  weak  in  my  delay.  This  prolonged  hanging 
off  from  true  knowledge  had  been  the  more  odd, 
so  that  I  couldn't  have  explained  it,  I  felt, 
through  the  fact  that  The  Wonder-Book  and 
Twice-Told  Tales  had  helped  to  enchant  our 
childhood;  the  consequence  at  any  rate  seemed 
happy,  since  without  it,  very  measurably,  the 
sudden  sense  of  recognition  would  have  been 
less  uplifting  a  wave.  The  joy  of  the  recognition 
was  to  know  at  the  time  no  lapse  —  was  in  fact 
through  the  years  never  to  know  one,  and  this 
by  some  rare  action  of  a  principle  or  a  sentiment, 
I  scarce  know  whether  to  call  it  a  clinging  con 
sistency  or  a  singular  silliness,  that  placed  the 
Seven  Gables,  the  Blithedale  Romance  and  the 
story  of  Donatello  and  Miriam  (the  accepted 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    409 

title  of  which  I  dislike  to  use,  not  the  " marble" 
but    very    particularly    the    human    Faun    being 
throughout   in   question)    somewhere   on   a   shelf 
unvisited    by    harsh    inquiry.     The    feeling    had 
perhaps  at  the  time  been  marked  by  presumption, 
by    a    touch    of   the   fatuity    of   patronage;     yet 
wasn't   well-nigh   the   best   charm   of   a   relation 
with  the  works  just  named  in  the  impulse,  known 
from  the  first,  somehow  to  stand  in  between  them 
and  harsh  inquiry?     If  I  had  asked  myself  what 
I    meant   by    that    term,    at    which    freedom    of 
appreciation,  in  fact  of  intelligence,  might  have 
looked  askance,  I  hope  I  should  have  found  a 
sufficient  answer  in  the  mere  plea  of  a  sort  of 
betise  of  tenderness.     I  recall  how  once,  in  the  air 
of  Rome  at  a  time  ever  so  long  subsequent,  a 
friend  and  countryman  now  no  more,  who  had 
spent  most  of  his  life  in  Italy  and  who  remains 
for  me,  with  his  accomplishment,  his  distinction, 
his  extraordinary  play  of  mind  and  his  too  early 
and  too  tragic  death,  the  clearest  case  of  "cosmo 
politan  culture"  I  was  to  have  known,  exclaimed 
with  surprise  on  my  happening  to  speak  as  from 
an  ancient  fondness  for  Hawthorne's  treatment 
of  the  Roman  scene:    "Why,  can  you  read  that 
thing,  and   here?  — to   me   it   means    nothing   at 
all!"     I   remember   well   that   under   the   breath 
of  this  disallowance  of  any  possibility  of  associa 
tion,  and  quite  most  of  such  a  one  as  I  had  from 


410    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

far  back  positively  cultivated,  the  gentle  perfo 
rated  book  tumbled  before  me  from  its  shelf  very 
much  as  old  Polonius,  at  the  thrust  of  Hamlet's 
sword,  must  have  collapsed  behind  the  pictured 
arras.  Of  course  I  might  have  picked  it  up  and 
brushed  it  off,  but  I  seem  to  feel  again  that  I 
didn't  so  much  as  want  to,  lost  as  I  could  only 
have  been  in  the  sense  that  the  note  of  harsh 
inquiry,  or  in  other  words  of  the  very  stroke  I  had 
anciently  wished  to  avert,  there  fell  straight  upon 
my  ear.  It  represented  everything  I  had  so 
early  known  we  must  have  none  of;  though 
there  was  interest  galore  at  the  same  time  (as 
there  almost  always  is  in  lively  oppositions  of 
sensibility,  with  the  sharpness  of  each,  its  special 
exclusions,  well  exhibited),  in  an  "American" 
measure  that  could  so  reject  our  beautiful  genius 
and  in  a  Roman,  as  it  were,  that  could  so  little 
see  he  had  done  anything  for  Rome.  H.  B. 
Brewster  in  truth,  literary  master  of  three  tongues 
at  least,  was  scarce  American  at  all;  homely 
superstitions  had  no  hold  on  him;  he  was  French, 
Italian,  above  all  perhaps  German;  and  there 
would  have  been  small  use,  even  had  there  been 
any  importance,  in  my  trying  to  tell  him  for 
instance  why  it  had  particularly  been,  in  the 
gentle  time,  that  I  had  settled  once  for  all  to 
take  our  author's  case  as  simply  exquisite  and 
not  budge  from  that  taking.  Which  indeed 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    411 

scarce  bears  telling  now,  with  matters  of  relative 
(if  but  of  relative !)  urgence  on  hand  —  consisting 
as  it  mainly  did  in  the  fact  that  his  work  was  all 
charged  with  a  tone,  a  full  and  rare  tone  of  prose, 
and  that  this  made  for  it  an  extraordinary  value 
in  an  air  in  which  absolutely  nobody's  else  was 
or  has  shown  since  any  aptitude  for  being.  And 
the  tone  had  been,  in  its  beauty  —  for  me  at  least 
-  ever  so  appreciably  American;  which  proved  to 
what  a  use  American  matter  could  be  put  by  an  \ 
American  hand:  a  consummation  involving,  it 
appeared,  the  happiest  moral.  For  the  moral 
was  that  an  American  could  be  an  artist,  one  of 
the  finest,  without  "going  outside"  about  it, 
as  I  liked  to  say;  quite  in  fact  as  if  Hawthorne 
had  become  one  just  by  being  American  enough, 
by  the  felicity  of  how  the  artist  in  him  missed 
nothing,  suspected  nothing,  that  the  ambient 
air  didn't  affect  him  as  containing.  Thus  he  was 
at  once  so  clear  and  so  entire  —  clear  without 
thinness,  for  he  might  have  seemed  underfed,  it 
was  his  danger;  and  entire  without  heterogeneity, 
which  might,  with  less  luck  and  to  the  discredit 
of  our  sufficing  manners,  have  had  to  be  his  help. 
These  remarks,  as  I  say,  were  those  I  couldn't,  or 
at  any  rate  didn't,  make  to  my  Roman  critic;  if 
only  because  I  was  so  held  by  the  other  case  he 
offered  me  —  that  of  a  culture  for  which,  in  the 
dense  medium  around  us,  Miriam  and  Donatello 


412    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

and  their  friends  hadn't  the  virtue  that  shines 
or  pushes  through.  I  tried  to  feel  that  this 
constatation  left  me  musing  —  and  perhaps  in  truth 
it  did;  though  doubtless  if  my  attachment  to 
the  arranger  of  those  images  had  involved,  to 
repeat,  my  not  budging,  my  meditation,  whatever 
it  was,  respected  that  condition. 

It  has  renewed  itself,  however,  but  too  much 
on  this  spot,  and  the  scene  viewed  from  Ashbur- 
ton  Place  claims  at  the  best  more  filling  in  than  I 
can  give  it.  Any  illustration  of  anything  worth 
illustrating  has  beauty,  to  my  vision,  largely  by 
its  developments;  and  developments,  alas,  are 
the  whole  flowering  of  the  plant,  while  what 
really  meets  such  attention  as  one  may  hope  to 
beguile  is  at  the  best  but  a  plucked  and  tossed 
sprig  or  two.  That  my  elder  brother  was  during 
these  months  away  with  Professor  Agassiz,  a 
member  of  the  party  recruited  by  that  great 
naturalist  for  a  prolonged  exploration  of  Brazil, 
is  one  of  the  few  blooms,  I  see,  that  I  must 
content  myself  with  detaching  —  the  main  sense 
of  it  being  for  myself,  no  doubt,  that  his  absence 
(and  he  had  never  been  at  anything  like  such  a 
distance  from  us,)  left  me  the  more  exposed,  and 
thereby  the  more  responsive,  to  contact  with 
impressions  that  had  to  learn  to  suffice  for  me 
in  their  uncorrected,  when  not  still  more  in  their 
inspiringly  emphasised,  state.  The  main  sense 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    413 

for  William  himself  is  recorded  in  a  series  of 
letters  from  him  addressed  to  us  at  home  and  for 
which,  against  my  hope,  these  pages  succeed  in 
affording  no  space  —  they  are  to  have  ampler 
presentation;  but  the  arrival  of  which  at  ir 
regular  intervals  for  the  greater  part  of  a  year 
comes  back  to  me  as  perhaps  a  fuller  enrichment 
of  my  consciousness  than  it  owed  for  the  time  to 
any  other  single  source.  We  all  still  hung  so 
together  that  this  replete  organ  could  yet  go  on 
helping  itself,  with  whatever  awkwardness,  from 
the  conception  or  projection  of  others  of  a  like 
general  strain,  such  as  those  of  one's  brothers 
might  appear;  thanks  to  which  constant  hum 
of  borrowed  experience,  in  addition  to  the 
quicker  play  of  whatever  could  pass  as  more 
honestly  earned,  my  stage  of  life  knew  no  drop 
of  the  curtain.  I  literally  came  and  went,  I  had 
never  practised  such  coming  and  going;  I  went 
in  particular,  during  summer  weeks,  and  even 
if  carrying  my  general  difficulty  with  me,  to  the 
White  Mountains  of  New  Hampshire,  with  some 
repetition,  and  again  and  again  back  to  Newport, 
on  visits  to  John  La  Farge  and  to  the  Edmund 
Tweedys  (their  house  almost  a  second  summer 
home  to  us;)  to  say  nothing  of  winter  attempts, 
a  little  weak,  but  still  more  or  less  achieved,  upon 
New  York  —  which  city  was  rapidly  taking  on  the 
capital  quality,  the  large  worldly  sense  that  dear 


414     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

old  London  and  dear  old  Paris,  with  other 
matters  in  hand  for  them  as  time  went  on,  the 
time  they  were  "biding"  for  me,  indulgently 
didn't  grudge  it.  The  matters  they  had  in  hand 
wandered  indeed  as  stray  vague  airs  across  to 
us  —  this  I  think  I  have  noted;  but  Boston  itself 
could  easily  rule,  in  default  even  of  New  York, 
when  to  "go,"  in  particular,  was  an  act  of  such 
easy  virtue.  To  go  from  Ashburton  Place  was 
to  go  verily  round  the  corner  not  less  than  further 
afield;  to  go  to  the  Athenaeum,  to  the  Museum, 
to  a  certain  door  of  importances,  in  fact  of 
immensities,  defiant  of  vulgar  notation,  in  Charles 
Street,  at  the  opposite  end  from  Beacon.  The 
fruit  of  these  mixed  proceedings  I  found  abundant 
at  the  time,  and  I  think  quite  inveterately  sweet, 
but  to  gather  it  in  again  now  —  by  which  I  mean 
set  it  forth  as  a  banquet  for  imaginations  already 
provided  —  would  be  to  presume  too  far;  not 
least  indeed  even  on  my  own  cultivated  art  of 
exhibition.  The  fruit  of  golden  youth  is  all 
and  always  golden  —  it  touches  to  gold  what  it 
gathers;  this  was  so  the  essence  of  the  case  that 
in  the  first  place  everything  was  in  some  degree 
an  adventure,  and  in  the  second  any  differences 
of  degree  guiding  my  selection  would  be  imper 
ceptible  at  this  end  of  time  to  the  cold  eye  of 
criticism.  Not  least  moreover  in  the  third  place 
the  very  terms  would  fail,  under  whatever  in- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    415 

genuity,  for  my  really  justifying  so  bland  an  ac 
count  of  the  period  at  large.  Do  I  speak  of  it 
as  a  thumping  sum  but  to  show  it  in  the  small 
change,  the  handful  of  separate  copper  and  silver 
coin,  the  scattered  occasions  reduced  to  their 
individual  cash  value,  that,  spread  upon  the  table 
as  a  treasure  of  reminiscence,  might  only  excite 
derision?  Why  was  "staying  at  Newport" 
so  absurdly,  insistently  romantic,  romantic  out 
of  all  proportion,  as  we  say  —  why  unless  I  can 
truly  tell  in  proportion  to  what  it  became  so? 
It  consisted  often  in  my  "sitting"  to  John  La 
Farge,  within  his  own  precincts  and  in  the  open 
air  of  attenuated  summer  days,  and  lounging 
thereby  just  passive  to  the  surge  of  culture  that 
broke  upon  me  in  waves  the  most  desultory  and 
disjointed,  it  was  true,  but  to  an  absolute  effect 
of  unceasingly  scented  spray.  Particular  hours 
and  old  (that  is  young!)  ineffable  reactions  come 
back  to  me;  it's  like  putting  one's  ear,  doctor- 
fashion,  to  the  breast  of  time  —  or  say  as  the 
subtle  savage  puts  his  to  the  ground  —  and  catch 
ing  at  its  start  some  vibratory  hum  that  has  been 
going  on  more  or  less  for  the  fifty  years  since. 
Newport,  the  barren  isle  of  our  return  from 
Europe,  had  thus  become  —  and  at  no  such  great 
expense  if  the  shock  of  public  affairs,  everywhere 
making  interests  start  to  their  feet,  be  counted 
out  of  the  process  —  a  source  of  fifty  suggestions 


416    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

to  me;  which  it  would  have  been  much  less, 
however,  I  hasten  to  add,  if  the  call  of  La  Farge 
hadn't  worked  in  with  our  other  most  standing 
attraction,  and  this  in  turn  hadn't  practically 
been  part  of  the  positive  affluence  of  certain 
elements  of  spectacle.  Why  again  I  should  have 
been  able  to  see  the  pictorial  so  freely  suggested, 
that  pictorial  which  was  ever  for  me  the  dramatic, 
the  social,  the  effectively  human  aspect,  would 
be  doubtless  a  baffling  inquiry  in  presence  of 
the  queer  and  dear  old  phenomena  themselves; 
those  that,  taken  together,  may  be  described  at 
the  best,  I  suppose,  rather  as  a  much-mixed 
grope  or  halting  struggle,  call  it  even  a  competi 
tive  scramble,  toward  the  larger,  the  ideal 
elegance,  the  traditional  forms  of  good  society 
in  possession,  than  as  a  presentation  of  great 
noble  assurances. 

Spectacle  in  any  case  broke  out,  spectacle 
accumulated,  by  our  then  measure,  many  thick 
nesses  deep,  flushing  in  the  sovereign  light,  as  one 
felt  it,  of  the  waning  Rhode  Island  afternoons  of 
August  and  September  with  the  most  "evolved" 
material  civilisation  our  American  world  could 
then  show;  the  vividest  note  of  this  in  those 
years,  unconscious,  even  to  an  artless  innocence, 
of  the  wider  wings  still  to  spread,  being  the  long 
daily  corso  or  processional  drive  (with  cavaliers 
and  amazons  not  otherwise  than  conveniently 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    417 

intermixed,)  which,  with  a  different  direction  for 
different  days,  offered  doubtless  as  good  an 
example  of  that  gregarious  exercise  at  any  cost 
distinguishing  "fashionable  life"  as  was  any 
where  on  the  globe  to  be  observed.  The  price 
paid  for  the  sticking  together  was  what  empha 
sised,  I  mean,  the  wondrous  resolve  to  stick, 
however  scant  and  narrow  and  unadjusted  for 
processional  effect  the  various  fields  of  evolution.  I 
The  variety  moreover  was  short,  just  as  the 
incongruities  of  composition  in  the  yearning 
array  were  marked;  but  the  tender  grace  of  old 
sunset  hours,  the  happier  breadth  of  old  shining 
sands  under  favour  of  friendly  tides,  the  glitter 
quand  meme  of  "caparisoned"  animals,  appointed 
vehicles  and  approved  charioteers,  to  say  nothing 
of  the  other  and  more  freely  exchanged  and 
interrelated  brightnesses  then  at  play  (in  the 
softer  ease  of  women,  the  more  moustachio'd 
swagger  of  men,  the  braver  bonhomie  of  the 
social  aspect  at  large),  melted  together  for  fond 
fancy  into  a  tone,  a  rhythm,  a  representational 
virtue  charged,  as  to  the  amenities,  with  author 
ity.  The  amenities  thus  sought  their  occasion  to 
multiply  even  to  the  sound  of  far  cannonades, 
and  I  well  remember  at  once  reflecting,  in  such 
maturity  as  I  could  muster,  that  the  luckier  half 
of  a  nation  able  to  carry  a  huge  war-burden 
without  sacrifice  of  amusement  might  well  over- 


418    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

come  the  fraction  that  had  to  feed  but  on  shrink 
age  and  privation;  at  the  same  time  that  the 
so  sad  and  handsome  face  of  the  most  frequent 
of  our  hostesses,  Mary  Temple  the  elder  as  she 
had  been,  now  the  apt  image  of  a  stern  priestess 
of  the  public  altar,  was  to  leave  with  me  for  the 
years  to  come  the  grand  expression  and  tragic 
irony  of  its  revulsion  from  those  who,  offering 
us  some  high  entertainment  during  days  of 
particular  tension,  could  fiddle,  as  she  scathingly 
said,  while  Rome  was  burning.  Blest  again  the 
state  of  youth  which  could  appreciate  that 
admirable  look  and  preserve  it  for  illustration  of 
one  of  the  forms  of  ancient  piety  lost  to  us,  and 
yet  at  the  same  time  stow  away  as  part  of  the 
poetry  of  the  general  drama  just  the  luxury  and 
pride,  overhanging  summer  seas  and  projecting 
into  summer  nights  great  shafts  of  light  and 
sound,  that  prompted  the  noble  scorn.  The 
"round  of  pleasure"  all  this  with  a  grand  good 
conscience  of  course  —  for  it  always  in  the  like 
case  has  that,  had  it  at  least  when  arranging 
performances,  dramatic  and  musical,  at  ever  so 
much  a  ticket,  under  the  advantage  of  rare 
amateur  talent,  in  aid  of  the  great  Sanitary 
Commission  that  walked  in  the  footsteps  and 
renewed  in  various  forms  the  example  of  Florence 
Nightingale;  these  exhibitions  taking  place  in 
deed  more  particularly  in  the  tributary  cities, 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    419 

New  York,  Philadelphia,  Boston  (we  were  then 
shut  up  to  those,)  but  with  the  shining  stars 
marked  for  triumphant  appearance  announced 
in  advance  on  the  Newport  scene  and  glittering 
there  as  beauties,  as  elegantes,  as  vocalists,  as 
heroines  of  European  legend.  Hadn't  there 
broken  upon  us,  under  public  stress,  a  refluent 
wave  from  Paris,  the  mid-Empire  Paris  of  the 
highest  pitch,  which  was  to  raise  our  social 
water-mark  to  a  point  unprecedented  and  there 
strikingly  leave  it?  We  were  learning  new 
lessons  in  every  branch  —  that  was  the  sense  of 
the  so  immensely  quickened  general  pace;  and 
though  my  examples  may  seem  rather  spectral 
I  like  to  believe  this  bigger  breathing  of  the 
freshness  of  the  future  to  have  been  what  the 
collective  rumble  and  shimmer  of  the  whole 
business  most  meant.  It  exhaled  an  artless 
confidence  which  yet  momently  increased;  it 
had  no  great  sense  of  a  direction,  but  gratefully 
took  any  of  which  the  least  hint  was  given, 
gathering  up  by  the  way  and  after  the  fact  what 
ever  account  of  itself  a  vague  voice  might  strike 
off.  There  were  times  when  the  account  of  itself 
as  flooding  Lawton's  Valley  for  afternoon  tea 
was  doubtless  what  it  would  most  comfortably 
have  welcomed  —  Lawton's  Valley,  at  a  good 
drive's  length  from  the  seaward  quarter,  being 
the  scene  of  villeggiatura  of  the  Boston  muse,  as 


420    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

it  were,  and  the  Boston  muse  having  in  those 
after  all  battle-haunted  seasons  an  authority  and 
a  finish  of  accent  beyond  any  other  Tyrtaean 
strain.  The  New  York  and  perhaps  still  more 
the  Philadelphia  of  the  time  fumbled  more 
helplessly,  even  if  aspiringly,  with  the  Boston 
evidences  in  general,  I  think,  than  they  were  to 
be  reduced  to  doing  later  on;  and  by  the  happy 
pretext,  certainly,  that  these  superior  signs  had 
then  a  bravery  they  were  not  perhaps  on  their 
own  side  indefinitely  to  keep  up. 

They  rustled,  with  the  other  leafage  of  the 
umbrageous  grove,  in  the  summer  airs  that  hung 
over  the  long  tea-tables;  afternoon  tea  was  itself 
but  a  new  and  romantic  possibility,  with  the 
lesson  of  it  gratefully  learnt  at  hands  that  dis 
pensed,  with  the  tea  and  sugar  and  in  the 
charmingest  voice  perhaps  then  to  be  heard 
among  us,  a  tone  of  talk  that  New  York  took  for 
exotic  and  inimitable,  yet  all  the  more  felt 
"good,"  much  better  than  it  might  if  left  all 
to  itself,  for  thus  flocking  in  every  sort  of  convey 
ance  to  listen  to.  The  Valley  was  deep,  winding 
and  pastoral  —  or  at  least  looks  so  now  to  my 
attached  vision;  the  infancy  of  a  finer  self- 
consciousness  seemed  cradled  there;  the  in 
consequent  vehicles  fraternised,  the  dim,  the 
more  dejected,  with  the  burnished  and  upstanding; 
so  that  I  may  really  perhaps  take  most  for  the 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    421 

note  of  the  hour  the  first  tremor  of  the  sense  on 
the  part  of  fashion  that,  if  it  could,  as  it  already 
more  or  less  suspected,  get  its  thinking  and 
reading  and  writing,  almost  everything  in  fact 
but  its  arithmetic,  a  bit  dingily,  but  just  by  that 
sign  cleverly,  done  for  it,  so  occasion  seemed 
easy,  after  all,  for  a  nearer  view,  without  responsi 
bility,  of  the  odd  performers  of  the  service. 
When  these  last  were  not  literally  all  Bostonians 
they  were  New  Yorkers  who  might  have  been 
mistaken  for  such  —  never  indeed  by  Bostonians 
themselves,  but  only  by  other  New  Yorkers,  the 
rich  and  guileless;  so  the  effect  as  of  a  vague 
tribute  to  culture  the  most  authentic  (if  I  speak 
not  too  portentously)  was  left  over  for  the 
aftertaste  of  simple  and  subtle  alike.  Those 
were  comparatively  thin  seasons,  I  recognise,  in 
the  so  ample  career  of  Mrs.  Howe,  mistress  of 
the  Valley  and  wife  of  the  eminent,  the  militant 
Phil-Hellene,  Dr.  S.  G.  of  the  honoured  name, 
who  reached  back  to  the  Byronic  time  and  had 
dedicated  his  own  later  to  still  more  distinguished 
liberating  work  on  behalf  of  deaf  mutes;  for  if 
she  was  thus  the  most  attuned  of  interlocutors, 
most  urbane  of  disputants,  most  insidious  of 
wits,  even  before  her  gathered  fame  as  Julia 
Ward  and  the  established  fortune  of  her  elegant 
Battle-Hymn,  she  was  perhaps  to  have  served  the 
State  scarce  better  through  final  organised 


422    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

activities  and  shining  optimisms  and  great  lucky 
lyric  hits  than  by  having  in  her  vale  of  hetero 
geneous  hospitality  undermined  the  blank  assur 
ance  of  her  thicker  contingent  —  after  all  too  but 
to  an  amusing  vague  unrest  —  and  thereby 
scattered  the  first  rare  seed  of  new  assimilations. 
I  am  moved  to  add  that,  by  the  old  terminology, 
the  Avenue  might  have  been  figured,  in  the 
connection,  as  descending  into  the  glen  to  meet 
the  Point  —  which,  save  for  a  very  small  number 
of  the  rarest  representatives  of  the  latter,  it  could 
meet  nowhere  else.  The  difficulty  was  that  of 
an  encounter  of  birds  and  fishes;  the  two  tribes 
were  native  to  elements  as  opposed  as  air  and 
water,  the  Avenue  essentially  nothing  if  not 
exalted  on  wheels  or  otherwise  expertly  mounted, 
and  the  Point  hopelessly  pedestrian  and  un 
equipped  with  stables,  so  that  the  very  levels 
at  which  they  materially  moved  were  but  upper 
and  lower,  dreadfully  lower,  parallels.  And  in 
deed  the  way  to  see  the  Point  —  which,  without 
playing  on  the  word,  naturally  became  our 
highest  law  —  was  at  the  Point,  where  it  appeared 
to  much  higher  advantage  than  in  its  trudge 
through  the  purple  haze  or  golden  dust  of  super 
cilious  parades.  Of  the  advantage  to  which  it 
did  so  appear,  off  in  its  own  more  languorous 
climate  and  on  its  own  ground,  we  fairly  culti 
vated  a  conviction,  rejoicing  by  that  aid  very 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    423 

much  as  in  certain  old  French  towns  it  was 
possible  to  distinguish  invidiously  the  Ville  from 
the  Cite.  The  Point  was  our  cite,  the  primal 
aboriginal  Newport  —  which,  striking  us  on  a 
first  acquaintance  as  not  other  than  dilapidated, 
might  well  have  been  "restored"  quite  as  M. 
Viollet-le-Duc  was  even  then  restoring  Carcas 
sonne;  and  this  all  the  more  because  our  elder 
Newport,  the  only  seat  of  history,  had  a  dis 
mantled  grassy  fort  or  archaic  citadel  that  dozed 
over  the  waterside  and  that  might  (though  I  do 
take  the  vision,  at  close  quarters,  for  horrible) 
be  smartly  waked  up.  The  waterside,  which 
was  that  of  the  inner  bay,  the  ample  reach 
toward  Providence,  so  much  more  susceptible 
of  quality  than  the  extravagant  open  sea,  the 
"old  houses,"  the  old  elms,  the  old  Quaker  faces 
at  the  small-paned  old  windows,  the  appointed- 
ness  of  the  scene  for  the  literary  and  artistic 
people,  who,  by  our  fond  constructive  theory, 
lodged  and  boarded  with  the  Quakers,  always 
thrifty  these,  for  the  sake  of  all  the  sweetness 
and  quaintness,  for  the  sake  above  all  somehow 
of  our  hungry  felicity  of  view,  by  which  I  mean 
mine  and  that  of  a  trusty  friend  or  two,  T.  S. 
Perry  in  especial  -  -  those  attributes,  meeting  a 
want,  as  the  phrase  is,  of  the  decent  imagination, 
made  us  perhaps  overdramatise  the  sphere  of  the 
clever  people,  but  made  them  at  least  also,  when 


424    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

they  unmistakably  hovered,  affect  us  as  truly 
the  finest  touches  in  the  picture.  For  they  were 
in  their  way  ironic  about  the  rest,  and  that  was 
a  tremendous  lift  in  face  of  an  Avenue  that  not 
only,  as  one  could  see  at  a  glance,  had  no  irony, 
but  hadn't  yet  risen,  the  magazines  and  the  Point 
aiding,  to  so  much  as  a  suspicion  of  the  effect, 
familiar  to  later  generations,  with  which  the  word 
can  conversationally  come  in.  Oh  the  old  clever 
people,  with  their  difference  of  shade  from  that 
of  the  clever  old  ones  —  some  few  of  these  to  have 
been  discerned,  no  doubt,  as  of  Avenue  position: 
I  read  back  into  their  various  presences  I  know 
not  what  queer  little  functional  value  the  exercise 
and  privilege  of  which,  uncontested,  uncontrasted 
(save  with  the  absence  of  everything  but  stables) 
represents  a  felicity  for  the  individual  that  is 
lost  to  our  age.  It  could  count  as  functional 
then,  it  could  count  as  felicitous,  to  have  been 
reabsorbed  into  Boston,  or  to  propose  to  absorb 
even,  for  the  first  time,  New  York,  under  cover 
of  the  mantle,  the  old  artistic  draped  cloak,  that 
had  almost  in  each  case  trailed  round  in  Florence, 
in  Rome,  in  Venice,  in  conversations  with  Lan- 
dor,  in  pencilled  commemoration,  a  little  niggling 
possibly  but  withal  so  sincere,  of  the  "haunts" 
of  Dante,  in  a  general  claim  of  having  known 
the  Brownings  (ah  "the  Brownings"  of  those 
days!)  in  a  disposition  to  arrange  readings  of 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    425 

these  and  the  most  oddly  associated  other  poets 
about  the  great  bleak  parlours  of  the  hotels.  I 
despair,  however,  of  any  really  right  register  of 
the  art  with  which  the  cite  ingratiated  itself  with 
me  in  this  character  of  a  vivid  missionary 
Bohemia;  I  met  it  of  course  more  than  half  way, 
as  I  met  everything  in  the  faintest  degree  in 
gratiating,  even  suggesting  to  it  with  an  art  of 
my  own  that  it  should  become  so  —  though  in 
this  matter  I  rather  missed,  I  fear,  a  happy 
conversion,  as  if  the  authenticity  were  there  but 
my  sort  of  personal  dash  too  absent. 

I  appear  to  myself  none  the  less  to  have  had 
dash  for  approaches  to  a  confidence  more  largely 
seated;  since  I  recall  how,  having  commenced 
critic  under  Charles  Norton's  weighty  protection, 
I  was  to  find  myself,  on  all  but  the  very  morrow, 
invited  to  the  high  glory,  as  I  felt  it,  of  aiding 
to  launch,  though  on  the  obscurer  side  of  the 
enterprise,  a  weekly  journal  which,  putting  forth 
its  first  leaves  in  the  summer  of  '65  and  under  the 
highest  auspices,  was  soon  to  enjoy  a  fortune 
and  achieve  an  authority  and  a  dignity  of  which 
neither  newspaper  nor  critical  review  among  us 
had  hitherto  so  much  as  hinted  the  possibility. 
The  New  York  Nation  had  from  the  first,  to  the 
enlivening  of  several  persons  consciously  and 
ruefully  astray  in  our  desert,  made  no  secret  of 
a  literary  leaning;  and  indeed  its  few  foremost 


426     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

months  shine  most  for  me  in  the  light  of  their 
bestowal  of  one  of  the  longest  and  happiest 
friendships  of  my  life,  a  relation  with  Edwin 
Lawrence  Godkin,  the  Nation  incarnate  as  he 
was  to  become,  which  bore  fruit  of  affection  for 
years  after  it  had  ceased  to  involve  the  compara 
tively  poorer  exercise.  Godkin's  paper,  Godkin's 
occasional  presence  and  interesting  history  and 
vivid  ability  and,  above  all,  admirably  aggressive 
and  ironic  editorial  humour,  of  a  quality  and 
authority  new  in  the  air  of  a  journalism  that  had 
meant  for  the  most  part  the  heavy  hand  alone, 
these  things,  with  the  sudden  sweet  discovery 
that  I  might  for  my  own  part  acceptedly  stammer 
a  style,  are  so  many  shades  and  shifting  tints  in 
the  positive  historic  iridescence  that  flings  itself 
for  my  memory,  as  I  have  noted,  over  the 
"period"  of  Ashburton  Place.  Wherever  I  dip, 
again,  I  pull  out  a  plum  from  under  the  tooth  of 
time  —  this  at  least  so  to  my  own  rapt  sense  that 
had  I  more  space  I  might  pull  both  freely  and 
at  a  venture.  The  strongest  savour  of  the  feast  - 
with  the  fumes  of  a  feast  it  comes  back  —  was, 
I  need  scarce  once  more  insist,  the  very  taste  of 
the  War  as  ending  and  ended;  through  which 
blessing,  more  and  more,  the  quantity  of  military 
life  or  at  least  the  images  of  military  experience 
seemed  all  about  us,  quite  paradoxically,  to  grow 
greater.  This  I  take  to  have  been  a  result,  first 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    427 

of  the  impending,  and  then  of  the  effective, 
break-up  of  the  vast  veteran  Army,  swamping 
much  of  the  scene  as  with  the  flow  of  a  monster 
tide  and  bringing  literally  home  to  us,  in  bronzed, 
matured  faces  and  even  more  in  bronzed,  matured 
characters,  above  all  in  the  absolutely  acquired 
and  stored  resource  of  overwhelming  reference, 
reference  usually  of  most  substance  the  less  it 
was  immediately  explicit,  the  more  in  fact  it 
was  faded  and  jaded  to  indifference,  what  was 
meant  by  having  patiently  served.  The  very 
smell  of  having  so  served  was  somehow,  at  least 
to  my  supersensitive  nostril,  in  the  larger  and 
cooler  air,  where  it  might  have  been  an  emanation, 
the  most  masculine,  the  most  communicative  as 
to  associated  far-off  things  (according  to  the 
nature,  ever,  of  elements  vaguely  exhaled),  from 
the  operation  of  the  general  huge  gesture  of 
relief  —  from  worn  toggery  put  off,  from  old  army- 
cloth  and  other  fittings  at  a  discount,  from 
swordbelts  and  buckles,  from  a  myriad  saturated 
articles  now  not  even  lying  about  but  brushed 
away  with  an  effect  upon  the  passing  breeze  and 
all  relegated  to  the  dim  state  of  some  mere 
theoretic  commemorative  panoply  that  was  never 
in  the  event  to  be  objectively  disposed.  The 
generalisation  grew  richly  or,  as  it  were,  quite 
adorably  familiar,  that  life  was  ever  so  handsomely 
reinforced,  and  manners,  not  to  say  manner  at 


428    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

large,  refreshed,  and  personal  aspects  and  types 
accented,  and  categories  multiplied  (no  category, 
for  the  dreaming  painter  of  things,  could  our 
scene  afford  not  to  grab  at  on  the  chance),  just 
by  the  fact  of  the  discharge  upon  society  of  such 
an  amount  of  out-of-the-way  experience,  as  it 
might  roughly  be  termed  —  such  a  quantity  and 
variety  of  possession  and  assimilation  of  un 
precedented  history.  It  had  been  unprecedented 
at  least  among,  ourselves,  we  had  had  it  in  our 
own  highly  original  conditions  —  or  "they,"  to 
be  more  exact,  had  had  it  admirably  in  theirs; 
and  I  think  I  was  never  to  know  a  case  in  which 
his  having  been  directly  touched  by  it,  or,  in  a 
word,  having  consistently  "soldiered,"  learnt 
all  about  it  and  exhausted  it,  wasn't  to  count  all 
the  while  on  behalf  of  the  happy  man  for  one's 
own  individual  impression  or  attention;  call  it 
again,  as  everything  came  back  to  that,  one's 
own  need  to  interpret.  The  discharge  upon 
"society"  is  moreover  what  I  especially  mean; 
it  being  the  sense  of  how  society  in  our  image  of 
the  word  was  taking  it  all  in  that  I  was  most 
concerned  with;  plenty  of  other  images  figured 
of  course  for  other  entertainers  of  such.  The 
world  immediately  roundabout  us  at  any  rate 
bristled  with  more  of  the  young,  or  the  younger, 
cases  I  speak  of,  cases  of  "things  seen"  and  felt, 
and  a  delectable  difference  in  the  man  thereby 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    429 

made  imputable,  than  I  could  begin  here  to 
name  even  had  I  kept  the  record.  I  think  I 
fairly  cultivated  the  perceiving  of  it  all,  so  that 
nothing  of  it,  under  some  face  or  other,  shouldn't 
brush  my  sense  and  add  to  my  impression;  yet 
my  point  is  more  particularly  that  the  body 
social  itself  was  for  the  time  so  permeated,  in 
the  light  I  glance  at,  that  it  became  to  its  own 
consciousness  more  interesting.  As  so  many 
existent  parts  of  it,  however  unstoried  yet,  to 
their  minor  credit,  various  thrilled  persons  could 
inhale  the  interest  to  their  fullest  capacity  and 
feel  that  they  too  had  been  pushed  forward  —  and 
were  even  to  find  themselves  by  so  much  the 
more  pushable  yet. 

I  resort  thus  to  the  lift  and  the  push  as  the 
most  expressive  figures  for  that  immensely  remonte 
state  which  coincided  for  us  all  with  the  great 
disconcerting  irony  of  the  hour,  the  unforgettable 
death  of  Lincoln.  I  think  of  the  springtime  of 
'65  as  it  breathed  through  Boston  streets  —  my 
remembrance  of  all  those  days  is  a  matter, 
strangely  enough,  of  the  out-of-door  vision,  of 
one's  constantly  dropping  down  from  Beacon 
Hill,  to  the  brave  edge  of  which  we  clung,  for 
appreciation  of  those  premonitory  gusts  of  April 
that  one  felt  most  perhaps  where  Park  Street 
Church  stood  dominant,  where  the  mouth  of  the 
Common  itself  uttered  promises,  more  signs  and 


430    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

portents  than  one  could  count,  more  prodigies 
than  one  could  keep  apart,  and  where  further 
strange  matters  seemed  to  charge  up  out  of  the 
lower  districts  and  of  the  "business  world," 
generative  as  never  before  of  news.  The  streets 
were  restless,  the  meeting  of  the  seasons  couldn't 
but  be  inordinately  so,  and  one's  own  poor  pulses 
matched  —  at  the  supreme  pitch  of  that  fusion, 
for  instance,  which  condensed  itself  to  blackness 
roundabout  the  dawn  of  April  15th:  I  was  fairly 
to  go  in  shame  of  its  being  my  birthday.  These 
would  have  been  the  hours  of  the  streets  if  none 
others  had  been  —  when  the  huge  general  gasp 
filled  them  like  a  great  earth-shudder  and  people's 
eyes  met  people's  eyes  without  the  vulgarity  of 
speech.  Even  this  was,  all  so  strangely,  part  of 
the  lift  and  the  swell,  as  tragedy  has  but  to  be 
of  a  pure  enough  strain  and  a  high  enough 
connection  to  sow  with  its  dark  hand  the  seed 
of  greater  life.  The  collective  sense  of  what  had 
occurred  was  of  a  sadness  too  noble  not  somehow 
to  inspire,  and  it  was  truly  in  the  air  that,  what 
ever  we  had  as  a  nation  produced  or  failed  to 
produce,  we  could  at  least  gather  round  this 
perfection  of  a  classic  woe.  True  enough,  as 
we  were  to  see,  the  immediate  harvest  of  our 
loss  was  almost  too  ugly  to  be  borne  —  for  nothing 
more  sharply  comes  back  to  me  than  the  tune  to 
which  the  "esthetic  sense,"  if  one  glanced  but 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    431 

from  that  high  window  (which  was  after  all  one 
of  many  too),  recoiled  in  dismay  from  the  sight 
of  Mr.  Andrew  Johnson  perched  on  the  stricken 
scene.  We  had  given  ourselves  a  figure-head, 
and  the  figure-head  sat  there  in  its  habit  as  it 
lived,  and  we  were  to  have  it  in  our  eyes  for  three 
or  four  years  and  to  ask  ourselves  in  horror  what 
monstrous  thing  we  had  done.  I  speak  but  of 
aspects,  those  aspects  which,  under  a  certain  turn 
of  them,  may  be  all  but  everything;  gathered 
together  they  become  a  symbol  of  what  is  behind, 
and  it  was  open  to  us  to  waver  at  shop-windows 
exposing  the  new  photograph,  exposing,  that  is, 
the  photograph,  and  ask  ourselves  what  we  had 
been  guilty  of  as  a  people,  when  all  was  said,  to 
deserve  the  infliction  of  that  form.  It  was  vain 
to  say  that  we  had  deliberately  invoked  the 
"common"  in  authority  and  must  drink  the 
wine  we  had  drawn.  No  countenance,  no  salience 
of  aspect  nor  composed  symbol,  could  super 
ficially  have  referred  itself  less  than  Lincoln's 
mould-smashing  mask  to  any  mere  matter-of- 
course  type  of  propriety;  but  his  admirable 
unrelated  head  had  itself  revealed  a  type  —  as  if 
by  the  very  fact  that  what  niade  in  it  for  rough 
ness  of  kind  looked  out  only  less  than  what  made 
in  it  for  splendid  final  stamp,  in  other  words  for 
commanding  Style.  The  result  thus  determined 
had  been  precious  for  representation,  and  above 


432    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

all  for  fine  suggestional  function,  in  a  degree  that 
left  behind  every  medal  we  had  ever  played  at 
striking;  whereas  before  the  image  now  substi 
tuted  representation  veiled  her  head  in  silence 
and  the  element  of  the  suggested  was  exactly 
the  direst.  What,  however,  on  the  further  view, 
was  to  be  more  refreshing  than  to  find  that  there 
were  excesses  of  native  habit  which  truly  we 
couldn't  bear?  so  that  it  was  for  the  next  two 
or  three  years  fairly  sustaining  to  consider  that, 
let  the  reasons  publicly  given  for  the  impeachment 
of  the  official  in  question  be  any  that  would 
serve,  the  grand  inward  logic  or  mystic  law  had 
been  that  we  really  couldn't  go  on  offering  each 
other  before  the  nations  the  consciousness  of 
such  a  presence.  That  was  at  any  rate  the  style 
of  reflection  to  which  the  humiliating  case  reduced 
me;  just  this  withal  now  especially  working, 
I  feel,  into  that  image  of  our  generally  quickened 
activity  of  spirit,  our  having  by  the  turn  of  events 
more  ideas  to  apply  and  even  to  play  with,  that 
I  have  tried  to  throw  off.  Everything  I  recover, 
I  again  risk  repeating,  fits  into  the  vast  miscellany 
—the  detail  of  which  I  may  well  seem,  however, 
too  poorly  to  have  handled. 

Let  it  serve  then  for  a  scrap  of  detail  that  the 
appearance  of  William's  further  fortune  enjoyed 
thereabouts  a  grasp  of  my  attention  scarce 
menaced  even  by  the  call  on  that  faculty  of  such 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    433 

appearances  of  my  own  as  I  had  naturally  in 
some  degree  also  to  take  for  graces  of  the  banquet. 
I  associate  the  sense  of  his  being,  in  a  great  cause, 
far  away  on  the  billow  with  that  clearance  of  the 
air  through  the  tremendous  draught,  from  sea 
to  sea,  of  the  Northern  triumph,  which  seemed 
to  make  a  good-natured  infinitude  of  room  for 
all  the  individual  interests  and  personal  lives  that 
might  help  the  pot  to  bubble  —  if  the  expression 
be  not  too  mean  for  the  size  of  our  confidence; 
that  the  cause  on  which  the  Agassiz  expedition  to 
South  America  embarked  was  of  the  greatest 
being  happily  a  presumption  altogether  within 
my  scope.  It  reawoke  the  mild  divinatory  rage 
with  which  I  had  followed,  with  so  little  to  show 
for  it,  the  military  fortune  of  my  younger  brothers 
-  feeding  the  gentle  passion  indeed,  it  must  be 
added,  thanks  to  the  letter- writing  grace  of 
which  the  case  had  now  the  benefit,  with  report 
and  picture  of  a  vividness  greater  than  any  ever 
to  be  shed  from  a  like  source  upon  our  waiting 
circle.  Everything  of  the  kind,  for  me,  was 
company;  but  I  dwelt,  for  that  matter  and  as 
I  put  it  all  together,  in  company  so  constant  and 
so  enchanting  that  this  amounted  to  moving,  in 
whatever  direction,  with  the  mass  —  more  and 
more  aware  as  I  was  of  the  "fun"  (to  express  it 
grossly)  of  living  by  my  imagination  and  thereby 
finding  that  company,  in  countless  different 


434    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

forms,  could  only  swarm  about  me.  Seeing 
further  into  the  figurable  world  made  company  of 
persons  and  places,  objects  and  subjects  alike: 
it  gave  them  all  without  exception  chances  to 
be  somehow  or  other  interesting,  and  the  imagina 
tive  ply  of  finding  interest  once  taken  (I  think 
I  had  by  that  time  got  much  beyond  looking  for 
it),  the  whole  conspiracy  of  aspects  danced  round 
me  in  a  ring.  It  formed,  by  my  present  vision 
of  it,  a  shining  escort  to  one's  possibly  often 
hampered  or  mystified,  but  never  long  stayed 
and  absolutely  never  wasted,  steps;  it  hung 
about,  after  the  fashion  of  winter  evening  adum 
brations  just  outside  the  reach  of  the  lamplight, 
while  one  sat  writing,  reading,  listening,  watching 
-  perhaps  even  again,  incurably,  but  dawdling 
and  gaping;  and  most  of  all  doubtless,  if  it 
supplied  with  colour  people  and  things  often  by 
themselves,  I  dare  say,  neutral  enough,  how  it 
painted  thick,  how  it  fairly  smothered,  any 
surface  that  did  it  the  turn  of  showing  positive 
and  intrinsic  life!  Ah  the  things  and  the  people, 
the  hours  and  scenes  and  circumstances,  the 
inenarrables  occasions  and  relations,  that  I  might 
still  present  in  its  light  if  I  would,  and  with  the 
enormous  advantage  now  (for  this  I  should 
unblushingly  claim),  of  being  able  to  mark  for 
present  irony  or  pity  or  wonder,  or  just  for  a 
better  intelligence,  or  again  for  the  high  humour 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    435 

or  extreme  strangeness  of  the  thing,  the  rare 
indebtedness,  calculated  by  the  long  run,  in 
which  it  could  leave  particular  cases!  This 
necessity  I  was  under  that  everything  should  be 
interesting  —  for  fear  of  the  collapse  otherwise  of 
one's  sustaining  intention  —  would  have  confessed 
doubtless  to  a  closest  connection,  of  all  the 
connections,  with  the  small  inkpot  in  which  I 
seemed  at  last  definitely  destined  to  dip  to  the 
exclusion  of  any  stream  more  Pactolean:  a 
modest  manner  of  saying  that  difficulty  and 
slowness  of  composition  were  clearly  by  this  time 
not  in  the  least  appointed  to  blight  me,  however 
inveterate  they  were  likely  to  prove;  that 
production,  such  as  it  was,  floundered  on  in 
spite  of  them;  and  that,  to  put  it  frankly,  if  I 
enjoyed  as  much  company  as  I  have  said  no 
small  part  of  it  was  of  my  very  own  earning. 
The  freshness  of  first  creations  —  since  we  are 
exalted,  in  art,  to  these  arrogant  expressions  - 
never  fails,  I  take  it,  to  beguile  the  creator,  in 
default  of  any  other  victim^  even  to  the  last 
extravagance;  so  that  what  happened  was  that 
one  found  all  the  swarm  of  one's  intentions,  one's 
projected  images,  quite  "good  enough"  to  mix 
with  the  rest  of  one's  society,  setting  up  with  it 
terms  of  interpenetration,  an  admirable  com 
merce  of  borrowing  and  lending,  taking  and 
giving,  not  to  say  stealing  and  keeping.  Did  it 


436    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

verily  all,  this  freshness  of  felt  contact,  of  curiosity 
and  wonder,  come  back  perhaps  to  certain  small 
and  relatively  ridiculous  achievements  of  "pro 
duction"  as  aforesaid?  —  ridiculous  causes,  I 
mean,  of  such  prodigious  effects.  I  am  divided 
between  the  shame  on  the  one  hand  of  claiming 
for  them,  these  concocted  "short  stories,"  that 
they  played  so  great  a  part,  and  a  downright 
admiring  tenderness  on  the  other  for  their 
holding  up  their  stiff  little  heads  in  such  a  bustle 
of  life  and  traffic  of  affairs.  I  of  course  really 
and  truly  cared  for  them,  as  we  say,  more  than 
for  aught  else  whatever  —  cared  for  them  with 
that  kind  of  care,  infatuated  though  it  may  seem, 
that  makes  it  bliss  for  the  fond  votary  never  to 
so  much  as  speak  of  the  loved  object,  makes  it 
a  refinement  of  piety  to  perform  his  rites  under 
cover  of  a  perfect  freedom  of  mind  as  to  every 
thing  but  them.  These  secrets  of  the  imaginative 
life  were  in  fact  more  various  than  I  may  dream 
of  trying  to  tell;  they  referred  to  actual  concre 
tions  of  existence  as  well  as  to  the  supposititious; 
the  joy  of  life  indeed,  drawbacks  and  all,  was 
just  in  the  constant  quick  flit  of  association,  to 
and  fro,  and  through  a  hundred  open  doors, 
between  the  two  great  chambers  (if  it  be  not 
absurd,  or  even  base,  to  separate  them)  of  direct 
and  indirect  experience.  If  it  is  of  the  great 
comprehensive  fusion  that  I  speak  as  the  richest 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    437 

note  of  all  those  hours,  what  could  truly  have 
been  more  in  the  sense  of  it  than  exactly  such  a 
perfect  muddle  of  pleasure  for  instance  as  my 
having  (and,  as  I  seem  to  remember,  at  his 
positive  invitation)  addressed  the  most  presuming 
as  yet  of  my  fictional  bids  to  my  distinguished 
friend  of  a  virtual  lifetime,  as  he  was  to  become, 
William  Dean  Howells,  whom  I  rejoice  to  name 
here  and  who  had  shortly  before  returned  from  a 
considerable  term  of  exile  in  Venice  and  was  in 
the  act  of  taking  all  but  complete  charge  of  the 
Boston  "Atlantic"?  The  confusion  was,  to  be 
plain,  of  more  things  than  can  hope  to  go  into 
my  picture  with  any  effect  of  keeping  distinct 
there  —  the  felt  felicity,  literally,  in  my  perform 
ance,  the  felt  ecstasy,  the  still  greater,  in  my 
receipt  of  Howells's  message;  and  then,  naturally, 
most  of  all,  the  at  once  to  be  recorded  blest 
violence  in  the  break  upon  my  consciousness  of 
his  glittering  response  after  perusal. 

There  was  still  more  in  it  all  than  that,  however 
-  which  is  the  point  of  my  mild  demonstration ; 
I  associate  the  passage,  to  press  closer,  with  a 
long  summer,  from  May  to  November,  spent  at 
the  then  rural  retreat  of  Swampscott,  forty 
minutes  by  train  northward  from  Boston,  and 
that  scene  of  fermentation,  in  its  turn,  I  invest 
with  unspeakable  memories.  It  was  the  summer 
of  '66  and  of  the  campaign  of  Sadowa  across  the 


438    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

sea  —  we  had  by  that  time  got  sufficiently  away 
from  our  own  campaigns  to  take  some  notice  of 
those  of  other  combatants,  on  which  we  bestowed 
in  fact,  I  think,  the  highest  competence  of 
attention  then  anywhere  at  play;  a  sympathetic 
sense  that  bore  us  even  over  to  the  Franco- 
German  war  four  years  later  and  helped  us  to 
know  what  we  meant  when  we  "felt  strongly" 
about  it.  No  strength  of  feeling  indeed  of  which 
the  vibration  had  remained  to  us  from  the  other 
time  could  have  been  greater  than  our  woe- 
stricken  vision  of  the  plight  of  France  under  the 
portent  of  Sedan;  I  had  been  back  to  that 
country  and  some  of  its  neighbourhoods  for  some 
fifteen  months  during  the  previous  interval,  and 
I  recover  again  no  share  in  a  great  collective  pang 
more  vividly  than  our  particular  appalled  state, 
that  of  a  whole  company  of  us,  while  we  gaped  out 
at  the  cry  of  reiterated  bulletins  from  the  shade 
of  an  August  verandah,  and  then  again  from 
amid  boskages  of  more  immediate  consolation, 
during  the  Saratoga  and  the  Newport  seasons 
of  1870.  I  had  happened  to  repair  to  Saratoga, 
of  all  inconsequent  places,  on  my  return  from  the 
Paris  and  the  London  of  the  weeks  immediately 
preceding  the  war,  and  though  it  was  not  there 
that  the  worst  sound  of  the  first  crash  reached  us, 
I  feel  around  me  still  all  the  air  of  our  dismay  — 
which  was,  in  the  queerest  way  in  the  world, 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    439 

that  of  something  so  alien  mixed,  to  the  increase 
of  horror,  with  something  so  cherished:  the  great 
hot  glare  of  vulgarity  of  the  aligned  hotels  of  the 
place  and  period  drenching  with  its  crude  light 
the  apparent  collapse  of  everything  we  had 
supposed  most  massive.  Which  forward  stretch 
on  the  part  of  this  chronicle  represents,  I  recog 
nise,  the  practice  of  the  discursive  well-nigh 
overmastering  its  principle  —  or  would  do  so, 
rather,  weren't  it  that  the  fitful  and  the  flickering, 
the  extravagant  advance  and  the  corrective 
retreat  from  it,  the  law  and  the  lovely  art  of 
foreshortening,  have  had  here  throughout  most 
to  serve  me.  It  is  under  countenance  of  that 
law  that  I  still  grasp  my  capricious  clue,  making 
a  jump  for  the  moment  over  two  or  three  years 
and  brushing  aside  by  the  way  quite  numberless 
appeals,  claims  upon  tenderness  of  memory 
not  less  than  pleas  for  charm  of  interest,  against 
which  I  must  steel  myself,  even  though  I  account 
this  rank  disloyalty  to  each.  There  is  no  quarter 
to  which  I  have  inclined  in  my  brief  recovery  of 
the  high  tide  of  impression  flooding  the  "period" 
of  Ashburton  Place  that  might  not  have  drawn 
me  on  and  on;  so  that  I  confess  I  feel  myself 
here  drag  my  mantle,  right  and  left,  from  the 
clutch  of  suppliant  hands  —  voluminous  as  it  may 
doubtless  yet  appear  in  spite  of  my  sense  of  its 
raggedness.  Wrapped  in  tatters  it  is  therefore 


440    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

that,  with  three  or  four  of  William's  letters  of 
'67  and  '68  kept  before  me,  I  make  my  stride,  not 
only  for  the  sake  of  what  I  still  regard  as  their 
admirable  interest,  but  for  the  way  they  bring 
back  again  to  me  everything  they  figured  at  the 
time,  every  flame  of  faith  they  rekindled,  every 
gage  they  held  out  for  the  future.  Present  for 
me  are  still  others  than  these  in  particular, 
which  I  keep  over  for  another  introducing,  but 
even  the  pages  I  here  preserve  overflow  with 
connections  —  so  many  that,  extravagant  as  it 
may  sound,  I  have  to  make  an  effort  to  breast 
them.  These  are  with  a  hundred  matters  of  our 
then  actual  life  —  little  as  that  virtue  may  per 
haps  show  on  their  face;  but  above  all  just  with 
the  huge  small  fact  that  the  writer  was  by  the 
blest  description  "in  Europe,"  and  that  this  had 
verily  still  its  way  of  meaning  for  me  more  than 
aught  else  beside.  For  what  sprang  in  especial 
from  his  situation  was  the  proof,  with  its  positive 
air,  that  a  like,  when  all  was  said,  might  become 
again  one's  own;  that  such  luck  wasn't  going 
to  be  for  evermore  perversely  out  of  the  question 
with  us,  and  that  in  fine  I  too  was  already  in  a 
manner  transported  by  the  intimacy  with  which 
I  partook  of  his  having  been.  I  shouldn't  have 
overstated  it,  I  think,  in  saying  that  I  really 
preferred  such  a  form  of  experience  (of  this 
particular  one)  to  the  simpler  —  given  most  of 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    441 

our  current  conditions;  there  was  somehow  a 
greater  richness,  a  larger  accession  of  knowledge, 
vision,  life,  whatever  one  might  have  called  it, 
in  "having  him  there,"  as  we  said,  and  in  my 
individually  getting  the  good  of  this  with  the 
peculiar  degree  of  ease  that  reinforced  the  general 
quest  of  a  special  sufficiency  of  that  boon  to 
which  I  was  during  those  years  rigidly,  and  yet 
on  the  whole  by  no  means  abjectly,  reduced. 

Our  parents  had  in  the  autumn  of  '66  settled, 
virtually  for  the  rest  of  their  days,  at  Cambridge, 
and  William  had  concomitantly  with  this,  that 
is  from  soon  after  his  return  from  Brazil,  entered 
upon  a  season  of  study  at  the  Harvard  Medical 
School,  then  keeping  its  terms  in  Boston  and 
under  the  wide  wing  of  -  -  as  one  supposed  it,  or 
as  I  at  any  rate  did  —  the  Massachusetts  General 
Hospital.  I  have  to  disengage  my  mantle  here 
with  a  force  in  which  I  invite  my  reader  to  believe 
-  for  I  push  through  a  thicket  of  memories  in 
which  the  thousand-fingered  branches  arrestingly 
catch;  otherwise  I  should  surrender,  and  with 
a  passionate  sense  of  the  logic  in  it,  to  that  long 
and  crowded  Swampscott  summer  at  which  its 
graceless  name  has  already  failed  to  keep  me 
from  having  glanced.  The  place,  smothered  in  a 
dense  prose  of  prosperity  now,  may  have  been 
even  in  those  days,  by  any  high  measure,  a  weak 
enough  apology  for  an  offered  breast  of  Nature: 


442    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

nevertheless  it  ministered  to  me  as  the  only 
"American  country"  save  the  silky  Newport 
fringes  with  which  my  growing  imagination,  not 
to  mention  my  specious  energy,  had  met  at  all 
continuous  occasion  to  play  —  so  that  I  should 
have  but  to  let  myself  go  a  little,  as  I  say,  to  sit 
up  to  my  neck  again  in  the  warm  depth  of  its 
deposit.  Out  of  this  I  should  lift  great  handfuls 
of  variety  of  vision;  it  was  to  have  been  in  its 
way  too  a  season  of  coming  and  going,  and  with 
its  main  mark,  I  make  out,  that  it  somehow 
absurdly  flowered,  first  and  last,  into  some 
intenser  example  of  every  sort  of  intimation  up 
to  then  vouchsafed  me,  whether  by  the  inward  or 
the  outward  life.  I  think  of  it  thus  as  a  big 
bouquet  of  blooms  the  most  mixed  —  yet  from 
which  it  is  to  the  point  just  here  to  detach  the 
sole  reminiscence,  coloured  to  a  shade  I  may  not 
reproduce,  of  a  day's  excursion  to  see  my  brother 
up  at  the  Hospital.  Had  I  not  now  been  warned 
off  too  many  of  the  prime  images  brought,  for 
their  confusion,  to  the  final  proof,  I  should  almost 
risk  ever  so  briefly  "evoking"  the  impression 
this  mere  snatch  was  to  leave  with  me,  the  picture 
as  of  sublime  activities  and  prodigious  possi 
bilities,  of  genial  communities  of  consideration 
and  acquisition,  all  in  a  great  bright  porticoed 
and  gardened  setting,  that  was  to  hang  itself  in 
my  crazy  cabinet  for  as  long  as  the  light  of  the 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    443 

hour  might  allow.  I  put  my  hand  on  the  piece 
still  —  in  its  now  so  deeply  obscured  corner; 
though  the  true  point  of  my  reference  would 
seem  to  be  in  the  fact  that  if  William  studied 
medicine  long  enough  to  qualify  and  to  take  his 
degree  (so  as  to  have  become  as  roundedly 
"scientific"  as  possible)  he  was  yet  immediately 
afterwards,  by  one  of  those  quick  shifts  of  the 
scene  with  which  we  were  familiar,  beginning 
philosophic  study  in  Germany  and  again  writing 
home  letters  of  an  interest  that  could  be  but 
re-emphasised  by  our  having  him  planted  out  as 
a  reflector  of  impressions  where  impressions  were 
both  strong  and  as  different  as  possible  from 
those  that  more  directly  beat  upon  us.  I  myself 
could  do  well  enough  with  these  last,  I  may 
parenthesise,  so  long  as  none  others  were  in 
question;  but  that  complacency  shrank  just  in 
proportion  as  we  were  reached  by  the  report  of 
difference  and  of  the  foreign  note,  the  report 
particularly  favourable  —  which  was  indeed  what 
any  and  every  report  perforce  appeared  to  me. 
William's,  from  anywhere,  had  ever  an  authority 
for  me  that  attended  none  others;  even  if  this 
be  not  the  place  for  more  than  a  word  of  light  on 
the  apparent  disconnection  of  his  actual  course. 
It  comes  back  to  me  that  the  purpose  of  practising 
medicine  had  at  no  season  been  flagrant  in  him, 
and  he  was  in  fact,  his  hospital  connection  once 


444    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

i . 
over,  never  to  practise  for  a  day.     He  was  on  the 

other  hand  to  remain  grateful  tfor  his  intimate 
experience  of  the  laboratory  and  the  clinic,  and  I 
was  as  constantly  to  feel  that  £h£  varieties  of  his 
application  had  been  as  little,  wasted  for  him  as 
those  of  my  vagueness  had  really  been  for  me. 
His  months  at  Dresden  and  his  winter  in  Berlin 
were  of  a  new  variety  -  -  this  last  even  with  that 
tinge  of  the  old  in  it  which  came  from  his  sharing 
quarters  with  T.  S.  Perry,  who,  his  four  years  at 
Harvard  ended  and  his  ensuing  grand  tour  of 
Europe,  as  then  comprehensively  carried  out, 
performed,  was  giving  the  Universities  of  Berlin 
and  Paris  a  highly  competent  attention.  To 
whatever  else  of  method  may  have  underlain  the 
apparently  lawless  strain  of  our  sequences  I 
should  add  the  action  of  a  sharp  lapse  of  health 
on  my  brother's  part  which  the  tension  of  a  year 
at  the  dissecting  table  seemed  to  have  done  much 
to  determine;  as  well  as  the  fond  fact  that 
Europe  was  again  from  that  crisis  forth  to  take 
its  place  for  us  as  a  standing  remedy,  a  regular 
mitigation  of  all  suffered,  or  at  least  of  all  wrong, 
stress.  Of  which  remarks  but  a  couple  of  letters 
addressed  to  myself,  I  have  to  recognise,  form 
here  the  occasion;  these  only,  in  that  order,  have 
survived  the  accidents  of  time,  as  I  the  more 
regret  that  I  have  in  my  mind's  eye  still  much 
of  the  matter  of  certain  others;  notably  of  one 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    445 

from  Paris  (on  his  way  further)  recounting  a  pair 
of  evenings  at  the  theatre,  first  for  the  younger 
Dumas  and  Les  Idees  de  Madame  Aubray,  with 
Pasca  and  Delaporte,  this  latter  of  an  exquisite 
truth  to  him,  and  then  for  something  of  the 
Palais  Royal  with  four  comedians,  as  he  emphati 
cally  noted,  who  were  each,  wonderful  to  say,  "de 
la  force  of  Warren  of  the  Boston  Museum."  He 
spent  the  summer  of  '67  partly  in  Dresden  and 
partly  at  Bad-Teplitz  in  Bohemia,  where  he  had 
been  recommended  the  waters;  he  was  to  re 
turn  for  Ihese  again  after  a  few  months  and  was 
also  to  seek  treatment  by  hydropathy  at  the 
establishment  of  Divonne,  in  the  French  back- 
country  of  Lake  Leman,  where  a  drawing  sent 
home  in  a  letter,  and  wtich  I  do  my  best  to 
reproduce,  very  comically  represents  him  as 
surrounded  by  the  listening  fair.  I  remember 
supposing  even  his  Dresden  of  the  empty  weeks 
to  bristle  with  precious  images  and  every  form  of 
local  character  —  this  a  little  perhaps  because  of 
his  treating  us  first  of  all  to  a  pair  of  whimsical 
crayoned  views  of  certain  animated  housetops 
seen  from  his  window.  It  is  the  old  names  in 
the  old  letters,  however,  that  now  always  most 
rewrite  themselves  to  my  eyes  in  colour  —  shades 
alas  that  defy  plain  notation,  and  if  the  two  with 
which  the  following  begins,  and  especially  the 
first  of  them,  only  asked  me  to  tell  their  story  I 


446    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

but   turn    my   back   on   the   whole   company    of 
which  they  are  part. 

...  I  got  last  week  an  excellent  letter  from  Frank 
Washburn  who  writes  in  such  a  manly  way.  But  the 
greatest  delight  I've  had  was  the  loan  of  5  Weekly 
Transcripts  from  Dick  Derby.  It's  strange  how 
quickly  one  grows  away  from  one's  old  surroundings. 
I  never  should  have  believed  that  in  so  few  months 
the  tone  of  a  Boston  paper  would  seem  so  outlandish 
to  me.  As  it  was,  I  was  in  one  squeal  of  amusement, 
surprise  and  satisfaction  until  deep  in  the  night,  when 
I  went  to  bed  tired  out  with  patriotism.  The  bois 
terous  animal  good-humour,  familiarity,  reckless  energy 
and  self-confidence,  unprincipled  optimism,  esthetic 
saplessness  and  intellectual  imbecility,  made  a  mixture 
hard  to  characterise,  but  totally  different  from  the 
tone  of  things  here  and,  as  the  Germans  would  say, 
whose  "Existenz  so  vollig  dasteht,"  that  there  was 
nothing  to  do  but  to  let  yourself  feel  it.  The  Amer 
icans  themselves  here  too  amuse  me  much;  they  have 
such  a  hungry,  restless  look  and  seem  so  unhooked 
somehow  from  the  general  framework.  The  other 
afternoon  as  I  was  sitting  on  the  Terrace,  a  gentleman 
and  two  young  ladies  came  and  sat  down  quite  near 
me.  I  knew  them  for  Americans  at  a  glance,  and 
the  man  interested  me  by  his  exceedingly  American 
expression:  a  reddish  moustache  and  tuft  on  chin,  a 
powerful  nose,  a  small  light  eye,  half  insolent  and  all 
sagacious,  and  a  sort  of  rowdy  air  of  superiority  that 
made  me  proud  to  claim  him  as  a  brother.  In  a  few 
minutes  I  recognised  him  as  General  M'Clellan,  rather 
different  from  his  photographs  of  the  War-time,  but 
still  not  to  be  mistaken  (and  I  afterwards  learned  he 
is  here).  Whatever  his  faults  may  be  that  of  not 
being  "one  of  us"  is  not  among  them. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    447 

This  next  is  the  note  of  a  slightly  earlier  im 
pression. 

The  Germans  are  certainly  a  most  gemiithlich  peo 
ple.  The  way  all  the  old  women  told  me  how  "freund- 
lich"  their  rooms  were  —  "so  freundlich  mobilirt" 
and  so  forth  —  melted  my  heart.  Whenever  you  tell 
an  inferior  here  to  do  anything  (e.g.  a  cabman)  he  or 
she  replies  "Schon!"  or  rather  "Schehn!"  with  an 
accent  not  quick  like  a  Frenchman's  "Bien!"  but  so 
protracted,  soothing  and  reassuring  to  you  that  you 
feel  as  if  he  were  adopting  you  into  his  family.  You 
say  I've  said  nothing  of  the  people  of  this  house,  but 
there  is  nothing  to  tell  about  them.  The  Doctor  is 
an  open-hearted  excellent  man  as  ever  was,  and 
wrapped  up  in  his  children;  Frau  Semler  is  a  sickly, 
miserly,  petty-spirited  nonentity.  The  children  are 
quite  uninteresting,  though  the  younger,  Anna  or 
Aennchen,  aged  five,  is  very  handsome  and  fat.  The 
following  short  colloquy,  which  I  overheard  one  day 
after  breakfast  a  few  days  since,  may  serve  you  as  a 
piece  of  local  colour.  Aennchen  drops  a  book  she  is 
carrying  across  the  room  and  exclaims  "Herr  Jesus!" 
Mother:  "Ach,  das  sagen  Kinder  nicht,  Anna!" 
Aennchen  (reflectively  to  herself,  sotto  voce): 
"Nicht  fur  Kinder!"  .  .  . 

What  here  follows  from  Divonne  —  of  fourteen 
months  later  —  is  too  full  and  too  various  to  need 
contribution  or  comment. 

You  must  have  envied  within  the  last  few  weeks  my 
revisiting  of  the  sacred  scenes  of  our  youth,  the  shores 
of  Leman,  the  Ecu  de  Geneve,  the  sloping  Corraterie, 
etc.  My  only  pang  in  it  all  has  been  caused  by  your 


448    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

absence,  or  rather  by  the  fact  of  my  presence  instead 
of  yours;  for  I  think  your  abstemious  and  poetic  soul 
would  have  got  much  more  good  of  the  things  I've 
seen  than  my  hardening  and  definite-growing  nature. 
I  wrote  a  few  words  about  Niirnberg  to  Alice  from 
Montreux.  I  found  that  about  as  pleasant  an  im 
pression  as  any  I  have  had  since  being  abroad  - 
and  this  because  I  didn't  expect  it.  The  Americans 
at  Dresden  had  told  me  it  was  quite  uninteresting. 
I  enclose  you  a  few  stereographs  I  got  there  —  I  don't 
know  why,  for  they  are  totally  irrelevant  to  the  real 
effect  of  the  place.  This  it  would  take  Theophile 
Gautier  to  describe,  so  I  renounce.  It  was  strange  to 
find  how  little  I  remembered  at  Geneva  —  I  couldn't 
find  the  way  I  used  to  take  up  to  the  Academy,  and 
the  shops  and  houses  of  the  Rue  du  Rhone  visible  from 
our  old  windows  left  me  uncertain  whether  they  were 
the  same  or  new  ones.  Kohler  has  set  up  a  new  hotel 
on  the  Quai  du  Mont-Blanc  —  you  remember  he's 
the  brother  of  our  old  Madame  Buscarlet  there;  but 
I  went  for  association's  sake  to  the  Ecu.  The  dining- 
room  was  differently  hung,  and  the  only  thing  in  my 
whole  24  hours  in  the  place  that  stung  me,  so  to  speak, 
with  memory,  was  that  kind  of  Chinese-patterned 
dessert-service  we  used  to  have.  So  runs  the  world 
away.  I  didn't  try  to  look  up  Ritter,  Chantre  or  any 
of  ces  messieurs,  but  started  off  here  the  next  morn 
ing,  where  I  have  now  been  a  week. 

My  impression  on  gradually  coming  from  a  German 
into  a  French  atmosphere  of  things  was  rather  un 
expected  and  not  in  all  respects  happy.  I  have  been 
in  Germany  half  amused  and  half  impatient  with  the 
slowness  of  proceeding  and  the  uncouthness  of  taste 
and  expression  that  prevail  there  so  largely  in  all 
things,  but  on  exchanging  it  for  the  brightness  and 
shipshapeness  of  these  quasi-French  arrangements  of 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    449 

life  and  for  the  tart  fire-cracker-like  speech  of  those  who 
make  them  I  found  myself  inclined  to  retreat  again 
on  what  I  had  left,  and  had  for  a  few  days  quite  a 
homesickness  for  the  easy,  ugly,  substantial  German 
ways.  The  "'tarnal"  smartness  in  which  the  railway 
refreshment  counters,  for  example,  are  dressed  up, 
the  tight  waists  and  "tasteful"  white  caps  of  the  fe 
male  servants,  the  everlasting  monsieur  and  madame, 
and  especially  the  quickness  and  snappishness  of 
enunciation,  suggesting  such  an  inward  impatience, 
quite  absurdly  gave  on  my  nerves.  But  I  am  getting 
used  to  it  all,  and  the  French  people  who  sit  near 
me  here  at  table  and  who  repelled  me  at  first  by  the 
apparently  cold-blooded  artificiality  of  their  address 
to  each  other,  now  seem  less  heartless  and  inhuman. 
I  am  struck  more  than  ever  I  was  with  the  hopeless 
ness  of  us  English,  and  a  fortiori  the  Germans,  ever 
competing  with  the  French  in  matters  of  form  or  finite 
taste  of  any  ^sort.  They  are  sensitive  to  things  that 
simply  don't  exist  for  us.  I  notice  it  here  in  manners 
and  speech:  how  can  a  people  who  speak  with  no 
tonic  accents  in  their  words  help  being  cleaner  and 
neater  in  expressing  themselves?  On  the  other  hand 
the  limitations  of  reach  in  the  French  mind  strike  me 
more  and  more;  their  delight  in  rallying  round  an 
official  standard  in  all  matters,  in  counting  and  dating 
everything  from  certain  great  names,  their  use  and  love 
of  catchwords  and  current  phrases,  their  sacrifice  of 
independence  of  mind  for  the  mere  sake  of  meeting 
their  hearer  or  reader  on  common  ground,  their  meta 
physical  incapacity  not  only  to  deal  with  questions 
but  to  know  what  the  questions  are,  stand  out  plainer 
and  plainer  the  more  headway  I  make  in  German. 
One  wonders  where  the  "Versohnung"  or  conciliation 
of  all  these  rival  national  qualities  is  going  to  take 
place.  I  imagine  we  English  stand  rather  between 


450    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

the  French  and  the  Germans  both  in  taste  and  in 
spiritual  intuition.  In  Germany,  while  unable  to 
avoid  respecting  that  solidity  of  the  national  mind 
which  causes  such  a  mass  of  permanent  work  to  be 
produced  there  annually,  I  couldn't  help  consoling 
myself  by  the  thought  that  whatever,  after  all,  they 
might  do,  the  Germans  were  a  plebeian  crowd  and 
could  never  be  such  gentlemen  as  we  were.  I  now  find 
myself  getting  over  the  French  superiority  by  an 
exactly  inverse  process  of  thought.  The  French 
man  must  sneer  at  us  even  more  than  we  sneer  at  the 
Germans  —  and  which  sneer  is  final,  his  at  us  two, 
or  ours  at  him,  or  the  Germans'  at  us?  It  seems  an 
insoluble  question,  which  I  fortunately  haven't  got  to 
settle. 

I've  read  several  novels  lately,  some  of  the  irre 
pressible  George's:  La  Daniella  and  the  Beaux  Mes 
sieurs  de  Bois-Dore.  (Was  it  thee,  by  the  bye  that 
wrotest  the  Nation  notices  on  her,  on  W.  Morris's 
new  poem  and  on  The  Spanish  Gypsy?  They  came 
to  me  unmarked,  but  the  thoughts  seemed  such  as 
you  would  entertain,  and  the  style  in  some  places  like 
yours  —  in  others  not.)  George  Sand  babbles  her 
improvisations  on  so  that  I  never  begin  to  believe  a 
word  of  what  she  says.  I've  also  read  The  Woman  in 
White,  a  couple  of  Balzac's,  etc.,  and  a  volume  of 
tales  by  Merimee  which  I  will  send  you  if  I  can  by 
Frank  Washburn.  He  is  a  big  man;  but  the  things 
which  have  given  me  most  pleasure  have  been  some 
sketches  of  travel  by  Th.  Gautier.  What  an  absolute 
thing  genius  is!  That  this  creature,  with  no  more 
soul  than  a  healthy  poodle-dog,  no  philosophy,  no 
morality,  no  information  (for  I  doubt  exceedingly  if 
his  knowledge  of  architectural  terms  and  suchlike  is 
accurate)  should  give  one  a  finer  enjoyment  than  his 
betters  in  all  these  respects  by  mere  force  of  good- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    451 

nature,  clear  eyesight  and  felicity  of  phrase!  His 
style  seems  to  me  perfect,  and  I  should  think  it  would 
pay  you  to  study  it  with  love  —  principally  in  the 
most  trivial  of  these  collections  of  notes  of  travel. 
T.  S.  P.  has  a  couple  of  them  for  you,  and  another, 
which  I've  read  here  and  is  called  Caprices  et  Zigzags, 
is  worth  buying.  It  contains  wonderful  French  (in 
the  classic  sense,  I  mean,  with  all  those  associations) 
descriptions  of  London.  I'm  not  sure  if  you  know 
Gautier  at  all  save  by  the  delicious  Capitaine  Fra- 
casse.  But  these  republished  feuilletons  are  all  of 
as  charming  a  quality  and  I  should  think  would  last  as 
long  as  the  language. 

There  are  70  or  80  people  in  this  etablissement,  no 
one  of  whom  I  have  as  yet  particularly  cottoned  up  to. 
It's  incredible  how  even  so  slight  a  barrier  as  the 
difference  of  language  with  most  of  them,  and  still 
more  as  the  absence  of  local  and  personal  associations, 
range  of  gibes  and  other  common  ground  to  stand  on, 
counts  against  one's  scraping  acquaintance.  It's  dis 
gusting  and  humiliating.  There  is  a  lovely  maiden  of 
etwa  19  sits  in  sight  of  me  at  the  table  with  whom  I 
am  falling  deeply  in  love.  She  has  never  looked  at 
me  yet,  and  I  really  believe  I  should  be  quite  incapable 
of  conversing  with  her  even  were  I  "introduced," 
from  a  sense  of  the  above  difficulties  and  because 
one  doesn't  know  what  subjects  or  allusions  may  be 
possible  with  a  jeune  fille.  I  suppose  my  life  for  the 
past  year  would  have  furnished  you,  as  the  great 
American  nouvelliste,  a  good  many  "motives"  and 
subjects  of  observation  —  especially  so  in  this  place. 
I  wish  I  could  pass  them  over  to  you  —  such  as  they 
are  you'd  profit  by  them  more  than  I  and  gather  in  a 
great  many  more.  I  should  like  full  well  an  hour's, 
or  even  longer,  interview  with  you,  and  with  the 
Parents  and  the  Sister  and  the  Aunt  and  all;  just  so 


452    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

as  to  start  afresh  on  a  clean  basis.     Give  my  love  to 

Wendell  Holmes.     I've  seen several  times; 

but  what  a  cold-blooded  cuss  he  is!  Write  me  your 
impression  of  T.  S.  P.,  who  will  probably  reach  you 
before  this  letter.  If  Frank  Washburn  ever  gets  home 
be  friendly  to  him.  He  is  much  aged  by  travel  and 
experience,  and  is  a  most  charming  character  and  gen 
erous  mind. 


XIII 

IF  I  add  to  the  foregoing  a  few  lines  more  from 
my  brother's  hand,  these  are  of  a  day  sepa 
rated  by  long  years  from  that  time  of  our 
youth  of  which  I  have  treated.  Addressed  after 
the  immense  interval  to  an  admirable  friend  whom 
I  shall  not  name  here,  they  yet  so  vividly  refer  - 
and  with  something  I  can  only  feel  as  the  first 
authority  -  -  to  one  of  the  most  prized  interests 
of  our  youth  that,  under  the  need  of  still  failing 
to  rescue  so  many  of  these  values  from  the  dark 
gulf,  I  find  myself  insist  the  more  on  a  place  here, 
before  I  close,  for  that  presence  in  our  early  lives 
as  to  which  my  brother's  few  words  say  so  much. 
To  have  so  promptly  and  earnestly  spoken  of 
Mary  Temple  the  younger  in  this  volume  is 
indeed  I  think  to  have  offered  a  gage  for  my  not 
simply  leaving  her  there.  The  opportunity  not 
so  to  leave  her  comes  at  any  rate  very  preciously 
into  my  hands,  and  I  can  not  better  round  off 
this  record  than  by  making  the  most  of  it.  The 
letter  to  which  William  alludes  is  one  that  my 
reader  will  presently  recognise.  It  had  come 
back  to  him  thus  clearly  at  the  far  end  of  time. 

453 


454    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

I  am  deeply  thankful  to  you  for  sending  me  this 
letter,  which  revives  all  sorts  of  poignant  memories 
and  makes  her  live  again  in  all  her  lightness  and  free 
dom.  Few  spirits  have  been  more  free  than  hers. 
I  find  myself  wishing  so  that  she  could  know  me  as  I 
am  now.  As  for  knowing  her  as  she  is  now — ??!!  I 
find  that  she  means  as  much  in  the  way  of  human 
character  for  me  now  as  she  ever  did,  being  unique  and 
with  no  analogue  in  all  my  subsequent  experience  of 
people.  Thank  you  once  more  for  what  you  have  done. 

The  testimony  so  acknowledged  was  a  letter 
in  a  copious  succession,  the  product  of  little  more 
than  one  year,  January  '69  to  February  '70, 
sacredly  preserved  by  the  recipient;  who  was 
not  long  after  the  day  of  my  brother's  acknowl 
edgment  to  do  me  the  honour  of  communicating 
to  me  the  whole  series.  He  could  have  done 
nothing  to  accord  more  with  the  spirit  in  which 
I  have  tried  to  gather  up  something  of  the  sense 
of  our  far-off  past,  his  own  as  well  as  that  of  the 
rest  of  us;  and  no  loose  clue  that  I  have  been 
able  to  recover  unaided  touches  into  life  anything 
like  such  a  tract  of  the  time-smothered  conscious 
ness.  More  charming  and  interesting  things 
emerge  for  me  than  I  can  point  to  in  their  order 
-  but  they  will  make,  I  think,  their  own  appeal. 
It  need  only  further  be  premised  that  our  delight 
ful  young  cousin  had  had  from  some  months 
back  to  begin  to  reckon  with  the  progressive 
pulmonary  weakness  of  which  the  letters  tell  the 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    455 

sad  story.  Also,  I  can  scarce  help  saying,  the 
whole  world  of  the  old  New  York,  that  of  the 
earlier  dancing  years,  shimmers  out  for  me  from 
the  least  of  her  allusions. 

I  will  write  you  as  nice  a  letter  as  I  can,  but  would 
much  rather  have  a  good  talk  with  you.  As  I  can't 
have  the  best  thing  I  am  putting  up  with  the  second- 
best,  contrary  to  my  pet  theory.  I  feel  as  if  I  were 
in  heaven  to-day  —  all  because  the  day  is  splendid 
and  I  have  been  driving  about  all  the  morning  in  a 
small  sleigh  in  the  fresh  air  and  sunshine,  until  I  found 
that  I  had  in  spite  of  myself,  for  the  time  being,  stopped 
asking  the  usual  inward  question  of  why  I  was  born. 
I  am  not  going  to  Canada  —  I  know  no  better  reason 
for  this  than  because  I  said  I  was  going.  My  brother- 
in-law  makes  such  a  clamour  when  I  propose  departure 
that  I  am  easily  overcome  by  his  kindness  and  my  own 
want  of  energy.  Besides,  it  is  great  fun  to  live  here; 
the  weather  just  now  is  grand,  and  I  knock  about  all 
day  in  a  sleigh,  and  do  nothing  but  enjoy  it  and  medi 
tate.  Then  we  are  so  near  town  that  we  often  go  in 
for  the  day  to  shop  and  lunch  with  some  of  our  numer 
ous  friends,  returning  with  a  double  relish  for  the  coun 
try.  We  all  went  in  on  a  spree  the  other  night  and 
stayed  at  the  Everett  House;  from  which,  as  a  start 
ing-point  we  poured  ourselves  in  strong  force  upon 
Mrs.  Gracie  King's  ball  —  a  very  grand  affair,  given 
for  a  very  pretty  Miss  King,  at  Delmonico's.  Our 
raid  consisted  of  thirteen  Emmets  and  a  moderate 
supply  of  Temples,  and  the  ball  was  a  great  success. 
It  was  two  years  since  I  had  been  to  one  and  I  en 
joyed  it  so  much  that  I  mean  very  soon  to  repeat  the 
experiment  —  at  the  next  Assembly  if  possible.  The 
men  in  society,  in  New  York,  this  winter,  are  prin- 


456    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

cipally  a  lot  of  feeble-minded  boys;  but  I  was  fortu 
nate  enough  to  escape  them,  as  my  partner  for  the 
German  was  a  man  of  thirty-five,  the  solitary  man,  I 
believe,  in  the  room.  Curiously  enough,  I  had  danced 
my  last  German,  two  years  before,  in  that  very  place 
and  with  the  same  person.  He  is  a  Mr.  Lee,  who  has 
spent  nearly  all  his  life  abroad;  two  of  his  sisters  have 
married  German  princes,  and  from  knocking  about 
so  much  he  has  become  a  thorough  cosmopolite.  As 
he  is  intelligent,  with  nothing  to  do  but  amuse  him 
self,  he  is  a  very  agreeable  partner,  and  I  mean  to 
dance  with  him  again  as  soon  as  possible.  I  don't 
know  why  I  have  tried  your  patience  by  writing  so 
about  a  person  you  have  never  seen;  unless  it's  to 
show  you  that  I  haven't  irrevocably  given  up  the 
world,  the  flesh  and  the  devil,  but  am  conscious  of  a 
faint  charm  about  them  still  when  taken  in  small 
doses.  I  agree  with  you  perfectly  about  Uncle  Henry 
- 1  should  think  he  would  be  very  irritating  to  the 
legal  mind;  he  is  not  at  all  satisfactory  even  to  mine. 
Have  you  seen  much  of  Willy  James  lately?  That  is 
a  rare  creature,  and  one  in  whom  my  intellect,  if  you 
will  pardon  the  misapplication  of  the  word,  takes  more 
solid  satisfaction  than  in  almost  anybody.  I  haven't 
read  Browning's  new  book  —  I  mean  to  wait  till  you 
are  by  to  explain  it  to  me  —  which  reminds  me,  along 
with  what  you  say  about  wishing  for  the  spring,  that 
we  shall  go  to  North  Conway  next  summer,  and  that 
in  that  case  you  may  as  well  make  up  your  mind  to 
come  and  see  us  there.  I  can't  wait  longer  than  that 
for  the  Browning  readings.  (Which  would  have  been 
of  The  Ring  and  the  Book.)  Arthur  Sedgwick  has 
sent  me  Matthew  Arnold's  photograph,  which  Harry 
had  pronounced  so  disappointing.  I  don't  myself,  on 
the  whole,  find  it  so;  on  the  contrary,  after  having 
looked  at  it  much,  I  like  it  —  it  quite  harmonises  with 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    457 

my  notion  of  him,  and  I  have  always  had  an  affection 
for  him.  You  must  tell  me  something  that  you  are 
sure  is  true  —  I  dont  care  much  what  it  may  be,  I 
will  take  your  word  for  it  Things  get  into  a  muddle 
with  me  —  how  can  I  give  you  "a  start  on  the  way 
of  righteousness"?  You  know  that  way  better  than 
I  do,  and  the  only  advice  I  can  give  you  is  not  to  stop 
saying  your  prayers.  I  hope  God  may  bless  you,  and 
beyond  those  things  I  hardly  know  what  is  right,  and 
therefore  what  to  wish  you.  Good-bye. 

"North  Con  way"  in  the  foregoing  has  almost 
the  force  for  me  of  a  wizard's  wand;  the  figures 
spring  up  again  and  move  in  a  harmony  that  is 
not  of  the  fierce  present;  the  sense  in  particular 
of  the  August  of  '65  shuts  me  in  to  its  blest  un- 
awarenesses  not  less  than  to  all  that  was  then 
exquisite  in  its  current  certainties  and  felicities; 
the  fraternising,  endlessly  conversing  group  of  us 
gather  under  the  rustling  pines  —  and  I  admire, 
precisely,  the  arrival,  the  bright  revelation  as  I 
recover  it,  of  the  so  handsome  young  man,  marked 
with  military  distinction  but  already,  with  our 
light  American  promptitude,  addressed  to  that 
high  art  of  peace  in  which  a  greater  eminence 
awaited  him,  of  whom  this  most  attaching 
member  of  the  circle  was  to  make  four  years  later 
so  wise  and  steady  a  confidant.  Our  circle  I 
fondly  call  it,  and  doubtless  then  called  it,  because 
in  the  light  of  that  description  I  could  most 
rejoice  in  it,  and  I  think  of  it  now  as  having 


458    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

formed  a  little  world  of  easy  and  happy  inter 
change,  of  unrestricted  and  yet  all  so  instinctively 
sane  and  secure  association  and  conversation, 
with  all  its  liberties  and  delicacies,  all  its  mirth 
and  its  earnestness  protected  and  directed  so 
much  more  from  within  than  from  without,  that 
I  ask  myself,  perhaps  too  fatuously,  whether  any 
such  right  conditions  for  the  play  of  young 
intelligence  and  young  friendship,  the  reading  of 
Matthew  Arnold  and  Browning,  the  discussion  of 
a  hundred  human  and  personal  things,  the  sense 
of  the  splendid  American  summer  drawn  out  to 
its  last  generosity,  survives  to  this  more  compli 
cated  age.  I  doubt  if  there  be  circles  to-day,  and 
seem  rather  to  distinguish  confusedly  gangs  and 
crowds  and  camps,  more  propitious,  I  dare  say, 
to  material  affluence  and  physical  riot  than 
anything  we  knew,  but  not  nearly  so  appointed 
for  ingenious  and  ingenuous  talk.  I  think  of 
our  interplay  of  relation  as  attuned  to  that 
fruitful  freedom  of  what  we  took  for  speculation, 
what  we  didn't  recoil  from  as  boundless  curiosity 
-  as  the  consideration  of  life,  that  is,  the  personal, 
the  moral  inquiry  and  adventure  at  large,  so  far 
as  matter  for  them  had  up  to  then  met  our  view  — 
I  think  of  this  fine  quality  in  our  scene  with  no 
small  confidence  in  its  having  been  rare,  or  to  be 
more  exact  perhaps,  in  its  having  been  possible 
to  the  general  American  felicity  and  immunity 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    459 

as  it  couldn't  otherwise  or  elsewhere  have  begun 
to  be.  Merely  to  say,  as  an  assurance,  that  such 
relations  shone  with  the  light  of  "innocence" 
is  of  itself  to  breathe  on  them  wrongly  or  rudely, 
is  uncouthly  to  "defend"  them  —  as  if  the  very 
air  that  consciously  conceived  and  produced 
them  didn't  all  tenderly  and  amusedly  take  care 
of  them.  I  at  any  rate  figure  again,  to  my 
customary  positive  piety,  all  the  aspects  now; 
that  in  especial  of  my  young  orphaned  cousins 
as  mainly  composing  the  maiden  train  and 
seeming  as  if  they  still  had  but  yesterday  brushed 
the  morning  dew  of  the  dear  old  Albany  natural 
ness;  that  of  the  venerable,  genial,  erect  great- 
aunt,  their  more  immediately  active  guardian,  a 
model  of  antique  spinsterhood  appointed  to  cares 
such  as  even  renewals  of  wedlock  could  scarce 
more  have  multiplied  for  her,  and  thus,  among 
her  many  ancient  and  curious  national  references 
-  one  was  tempted  to  call  them  —  most  impressive 
by  her  striking  resemblance  to  the  portraits,  the 
most  benignant,  of  General  Washington.  She 
might  have  represented  the  mother,  no  less 
adequately  than  he  represented  the  father,  of 
their  country.  I  can  only  feel,  however,  that 
what  particularly  drew  the  desired  circle  sharpest 
for  me  was  the  contribution  to  it  that  I  had  been 
able  to  effect  by  introducing  the  companion  of 
my  own  pilgrimage,  who  was  in  turn  to  introduce 


460    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

a  little  later  the  great  friend  of  his  then  expanding 
situation,  restored  with  the  close  of  the  War  to 
civil  pursuits  and  already  deep  in  them;  the 
interesting  pair  possessed  after  this  fashion  of  a 
quantity  of  common  fine  experience  that  glittered 
as  so  much  acquired  and  enjoyed  luxury  —  all  of  a 
sort  that  I  had  no  acquisition  whatever  to  match. 
I  remember  being  happy  in  that  I  might  re 
peatedly  point  our  moral,  under  permission  (for 
we  were  always  pointing  morals),  with  this 
brilliant  advantage  of  theirs  even  if  I  might  with 
none  of  my  own;  and  I  of  course  knew  —  what 
was  half  the  beauty  —  that  if  we  were  just  the 
most  delightful  loose  band  conceivable,  and 
immersed  in  a  regular  revel  of  all  the  harmonies, 
it  was  largely  by  grace  of  the  three  quite  excep 
tional  young  men  who,  thanks  in  part  to  the 
final  sublime  coach-drive  of  other  days,  had 
travelled  up  from  Boston  with  their  preparation 
to  admire  inevitably  quickened.  I  was  quite 
willing  to  offer  myself  as  exceptional  through 
being  able  to  promote  such  exceptions  and  see 
them  justified  to  waiting  apprehension.  There 
was  a  dangling  fringe,  there  were  graceful  acces 
sories  and  hovering  shades,  but,  essentially,  we 
of  the  true  connection  made  up  the  drama,  or 
in  other  words,  for  the  benefit  of  my  imagination, 
reduced  the  fond  figment  of  the  Circle  to  terms 
of  daily  experience.  If  drama  we  could  indeed 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    461 

feel  this  as  being,  I  hasten  to  add,  we  owed  it 
most  of  all  to  our  just  having  such  a  heroine  that 
everything  else  inevitably  came.  Mary  Temple 
was  beautifully  and  indescribably  that  —  in  the 
technical  or  logical  as  distinguished  from  the 
pompous  or  romantic  sense  of  the  word;  wholly 
without  effort  or  desire  on  her  part  —  for  never 
was  a  girl  less  consciously  or  consentingly  or 
vulgarly  dominant  —  everything  that  took  place 
around  her  took  place  as  if  primarily  in  relation 
to  her  and  in  her  interest:  that  is  in  the  interest 
of  drawing  her  out  and  displaying  her  the  more. 
This  too  without  her  in  the  least  caring,  as  I  say  - 
in  the  deep,  the  morally  nostalgic  indifferences 
that  were  the  most  finally  characteristic  thing 
about  her  —  whether  such  an  effect  took  place  or 
not;  she  liked  nothing  in  the  world  so  much  as 
to  see  others  fairly  exhibited;  not  as  they  might 
best  please  her  by  being,  but  as  they  might  most 
fully  reveal  themselves,  their  stuff  and  their 
truth:  which  was  the  only  thing  that,  after  any 
first  flutter  for  the  superficial  air  or  grace  in  an 
acquaintance,  could  in  the  least  fix  her  attention. 
She  had  beyond  any  equally  young  creature  I 
have  known  a  sense  for  verity  of  character  and 
play  of  life  in  others,  for  their  acting  out  of  their 
force  or  their  weakness,  whatever  either  might 
be,  at  no  matter  what  cost  to  herself;  and  it 
was  this  instinct  that  made  her  care  so  for  life 


462    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

in  general,  just  as  it  was  her  being  thereby  so 
engaged  in  that  tangle  that  made  her,  as  I  have 
expressed  it,  ever  the  heroine  of  the  scene.  Life 
claimed  her  and  used  her  and  beset  her  —  made 
her  range  in  her  groping,  her  naturally  immature 
and  unlighted  way  from  end  to  end  of  the  scale. 
No  one  felt  more  the  charm  of  the  actual  —  only 
the  actual  comprised  for  her  kinds  of  reality 
(those  to  which  her  letters  perhaps  most  of  all 
testify),  that  she  saw  treated  round  her  for  the 
most  part  either  as  irrelevant  or  as  unpleasant. 
She  was  absolutely  afraid  of  nothing  she  might 
come  to  by  living  with  enough  sincerity  and 
enough  wonder;  and  I  think  it  is  because  one 
was  to  see  her  launched  on  that  adventure  in 
such  bedimmed,  such  almost  tragically  compro 
mised  conditions  that  one  is  caught  by  her  title  to 
the  heroic  and  pathetic  mark.  It  is  always 
difficult  for  us  after  the  fact  not  to  see  young 
things  who  were  soon  to  be  lost  to  us  as  already 
distinguished  by  their  fate;  this  particular 
victim  of  it  at  all  events  might  well  have  made 
the  near  witness  ask  within  himself  how  her 
restlessness  of  spirit,  the  finest  reckless  impatience, 
was  to  be  assuaged  or  "met"  by  the  common 
lot.  One  somehow  saw  it  nowhere  about  us  as 
up  to  her  terrible  young  standard  of  the  interest 
ing  —  even  if  to  say  this  suggests  an  air  of  tension, 
a  sharpness  of  importunity,  than  which  nothing 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    463 

could  have  been  less  like  her.  The  charming, 
irresistible  fact  was  that  one  had  never  seen  a 
creature  with  such  lightness  of  forms,  a  lightness 
all  her  own,  so  inconsequently  grave  at  the  core, 
or  an  asker  of  endless  questions  with  such  ap 
parent  lapses  of  care.  It  is  true  that  as  an  effect 
of  the  state  of  health  which  during  the  year  '69 
grew  steadily  worse  the  anxious  note  and  serious 
mind  sound  in  her  less  intermittently  than  by 
her  former  wont. 

This  might  be  headed  with  that  line  of  a  hymn, 
"Hark,  from  the  tombs  etc.!"  -  but  perhaps  it  won't 
prove  as  bad  as  that.  It  looks  pretty  doubtful  still, 
but  I  have  a  sort  of  feeling  that  I  shall  come  round  this 
one  time  more;  by  which  I  don't  mean  to  brag!  The 
"it"  of  which  I  speak  is  of  course  my  old  enemy  hem 
orrhage,  of  which  I  have  had  within  the  last  week 
seven  pretty  big  ones  and  several  smaller,  hardly 
worth  mentioning.  I  don't  know  what  has  come  over 
me  —  I  can't  stop  them;  but,  as  I  said,  I  mean  to 
try  and  beat  them  yet.  Of  course  I  am  in  bed,  where 
I  shall  be  indefinitely  —  not  allowed  to  speak  one 
word,  literally,  even  in  a  whisper.  The  reason  I  write 
this  is  because  I  don't  think  it  will  hurt  me  at  all  —  if 
I  take  it  easy  and  stop  when  I  feel  tired.  It  is  a 
pleasant  break  in  the  monotony  of  gruel  and  of  think 
ing  of  the  grave  —  and  then  too  a  few  words  from  some 
body  who  is  strong  and  active  in  the  good  old  world 
(as  it  seems  to  me  now)  would  be  very  refreshing. 
But  don't  tell  anyone  I  have  written,  because  it  will 
be  sure  to  reach  the  ears  of  my  dear  relatives  and  will 
cause  them  to  sniff  the  air  and  flounce !  You  see  I  am 
a  good  deal  of  a  baby  —  in  the  sense  of  not  wanting 


464    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

the  reproaches  of  my  relatives  on  this  or  any  other 
subject.  .  .  .  All  the  Emmets  are  so  good  and  kind 
that  I  found,  when  it  came  to  the  point,  that  there 
was  a  good  deal  to  make  life  attractive,  and  that  if 
the  choice  were  given  me  I  would  much  rather  stay  up 
here  on  the  solid  earth,  in  the  air  and  sunshine,  with  an 
occasional  sympathetic  glimpse  of  another  person's 
soul,  than  to  be  put  down  underground  and  say  good 
bye  for  ever  to  humanity,  with  all  its  laughter  and  its 
sadness.  Yet  you  mustn't  think  me  now  in  any 
special  danger  of  dying,  or  even  in  low  spirits,  for  it 
isn't  so  —  the  doctor  tells  me  I  am  not  in  danger,  even 
if  the  hemorrhages  should  keep  on.  However,  "you 
can't  fool  a  regular  boarder,"  as  Mr.  Holmes  would 
say,  and  I  can't  see  why  there  is  any  reason  to  think 
they  will  heal  a  week  hence,  when  I  shall  be  still 
weaker,  if  they  can't  heal  now.  Still,  they  may  be  going 
to  stop  —  I  haven't  had  one  since  yesterday  at  4,  and 
now  it's  3;  nearly  twenty -four  hours.  I  am  of  a  hope 
ful  temperament  and  not  easily  scared,  which  is  in  my 
favour.  If  this  should  prove  to  be  the  last  letter  you 
get  from  me,  why  take  it  for  a  good-bye;  I'll  keep  on 
the  lookout  for  you  in  the  spirit  world,  and  shall  be 
glad  to  see  you  when  you  come  there,  provided  it's  a 
better  place  than  this.  Elly  is  in  New  York,  enjoying 
herself  immensely,  and  I  haven't  let  her  know  how  ill 
I  have  been,  as  there  were  to  be  several  parties  this 
last  week  and  I  was  afraid  it  might  spoil  her  fun.  I 
didn't  mean  you  to  infer  from  my  particularising 
Willy  James's  intellect  that  the  rest  of  him  isn't  to  my 
liking  —  he  is  one  of  the  very  few  people  in  this  world 
that  I  love.  He  has  the  largest  heart  as  well  as  the 
largest  head,  and  is  thoroughly  interesting  to  me.  He 
is  generous  and  affectionate  and  full  of  sympathy  and 
humanity  —  though  you  mustn't  tell  him  I  say  so, 
lest  he  should  think  I  have  been  telling  you  a  lie  to 
serve  my  own  purposes.  Good-bye. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    465 

I  should  have  little  heart,  I  confess,  for  what 
is  essentially  the  record  of  a  rapid  illness  if 
it  were  not  at  the  same  time  the  image  of  an 
admirable  soul.  Surrounded  as  she  was  with 
affection  she  had  yet  greatly  to  help  herself, 
and  nothing  is  thus  more  penetrating  than  the 
sense,  as  one  reads,  that  a  method  of  care 
would  have  been  followed  for  her  to-day,  and 
perhaps  followed  with  signal  success,  that  was 
not  in  the  healing  or  nursing  range  of  forty  years 
ago. 

It  is  a  week  ago  to-day,  I  think,  since  I  last  wrote  to 
you,  and  I  have  only  had  one  more  hemorrhage  —  the 
day  after.  I  feel  pretty  sure  they  have  stopped  for  the 
present,  and  I  am  sitting  up  in  my  room,  as  bright  as 
possible.  Yesterday  when  I  walked  across  it  I  thought 
I  should  never  be  strong  again,  but  now  it's  quite  differ 
ent,  and  so  nice  to  be  out  of  bed  that  my  spirits  go  up 
absurdly.  As  soon  as  I  am  able  I  am  to  be  taken  to 
town  for  another  examination,  and  then  when  I  know 
my  fate  I  will  do  the  best  I  can.  This  climate  is  try 
ing,  to  be  sure,  but  such  as  it  is  I've  got  to  take  my 
chance  in  it,  as  there  is  no  one  I  care  enough  for,  or 
who  cares  enough  for  me,  to  take  charge  of  me  to  Italy, 
or  to  the  south  anywhere.  I  don't  believe  any  cli 
mate,  however  good,  would  be  of  the  least  use  to  me  with 
people  I  don't  care  for.  You  may  let  your  moustache 
grow  down  to  your  toes  if  you  like,  and  I  shall  but 
smile  scornfully  at  your  futile  precautions. 

Of  the  following,  in  spite  of  its  length,  I  can  bring 
myself  to  abate  nothing. 


466    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

....  Well,  "to  make  a  long  story  short,"  as.  Han 
nah  (her  old  nurse)  says,  I  caught  a  cold,  and  it  went 
to  the  weak  spot,  and  I  had  another  slight  attack  of 
hemorrhage;  but  I  took  the  necessary  steps  at  once, 
stayed  in  bed  and  didn't  speak  for  six  days,  and  then 
it  stopped  and  I  felt  better  than  I  had  at  all  since  I 
was  first  taken  ill.  But  I  began  to  tire  so  of  such  con 
stant  confinement  to  my  room  that  they  promised  to 
take  me  to  town  as  soon  as  I  was  well  enough,  and  per 
haps  to  the  Opera.  This  of  course  would  have  been 
a  wild  excitement  for  me,  and  I  had  charming  little 
plans  of  music  by  day  and  by  night,  for  a  week,  which 
I  meant  to  spend  with  Mrs.  Griswold.  Accordingly  a 
cavalcade  set  out  from  here  on  Monday,  consisting  of 
myself  escorted  by  sisters  and  friends,  who  were  to 
see  me  safely  installed  in  my  new  quarters  and  leave 
me.  I  arrived,  bundled  up,  at  Mrs.  Gris wold's,  and 
had  begun  to  consider  myself  already  quite  emanci 
pated  from  bondage  —  so  that  I  was  discussing  with 
my  brother-in-law  the  propriety  of  my  going  that 
evening  to  hear  Faust,  this  but  the  beginning  of  a 
mad  career  on  which  I  proposed  to  rush  headlong  — 
when  Dr.  Bassett  arrived,  who  is  the  medical  man  that 
I  had  meant  to  consult  during  my  stay  incidentally 
and  between  the  pauses  in  the  music.  The  first  thing 
he  said  was:  "What  are  you  doing  here?  Go  directly 
back  to  the  place  you  came  from  and  don't  come  up 
again  till  the  warm  weather.  As  for  music,  you 
mustn't  hear  of  it  or  even  think  of  it  for  two  months." 
This  was  pleasant,  but  there  was  nothing  to  be  done 
but  obey;  which  I  did  a  few  hours  later,  with  my 
trunk  still  unpacked  and  my  immediate  plan  of  life 
somewhat  limited. 

I  say  my  immediate  plan  because  my  permanent 
found  itself  by  no  means  curtailed,  but  on  the  contrary 
expanded  and  varied  in  a  manner  I  had  not  even  dared 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    467 

to  hope.  This  came  from  what  Dr.  B.  said  subse 
quently,  when  he  had  examined  my  lungs;  that  is  to 
say  after  he  had  laid  his  head  affectionately  first  under 
one  of  my  shoulders  and  then  the  other,  and  there 
kept  it  solemnly  for  about  ten  minutes,  in  a  way  that 
was  irresistibly  ludicrous,  especially  with  Kitty  as 
spectator.  His  verdict  was  that  my  lungs  were  sound, 
that  he  couldn't  detect  the  least  evidence  of  disease, 
and  that  hemorrhage  couldn't  have  come  from  the 
lung  itself,  but  from  their  membraneous  lining,  and 
that  of  the  throat,  whatever  this  may  be.  So  he  gave 
me  to  understand  that  I  have  as  sound  a  pair  of  lungs 
at  present  as  the  next  person;  in  fact  from  what  he 
said  one  would  have  thought  them  a  pair  that  a  prize 
fighter  might  covet.  At  the  same  time  he  sent  me 
flying  back  to  the  country,  with  orders  not  to  get  ex 
cited,  nor  to  listen  to  music,  nor  to  speak  with  anybody 
I  care  for,  nor  to  do  anything  in  short  that  the  unre- 
generate  nature  longs  for.  This  struck  my  untutored 
mind  as  somewhat  inconsistent,  and  I  ventured  a 
gentle  remonstrance,  which  however  was  not  even 
listened  to,  and  I  was  ignominiously  thrust  into  a  car 
and  borne  back  to  Pelham.  The  problem  still  bothers 
me:  either  sound  lungs  are  a  very  dangerous  thing  to 
have,  or  there  is  a  foul  conspiracy  on  foot  to  oppress 
me.  Still,  I  cling  to  the  consoling  thought  of  my  match 
less  lungs,  and  this  obliterates  my  present  sufferings. 

Harry  came  to  see  me  before  he  sailed  for  Europe; 
I'm  very  glad  he  has  gone,  though  I  don't  expect  to  see 
him  again  for  a  good  many  years.  I  don't  think  he  will 
come  back  for  a  long  time,  and  I  hope  it  will  do  him 
good  and  that  he  will  enjoy  himself  —  which  he  hasn't 
done  for  several  years.  I  haven't  read  all  of  Fausc, 
but  I  think  I  know  the  scenes  you  call  divine  —  at 
least  I  know  some  that  are  exquisite.  But  why  do 
you  speak  so  disparagingly  of  King  David,  whom  I 


468    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

always  had  a  weakness  for?  Think  how  charming 
and  lovable  a  person  he  must  have  been,  poet,  mu 
sician  and  so  much  else  combined  —  with  however 
their  attendant  imperfections.  I  don't  think  I  should 
have  cared  to  be  Queen  David  exactly.  I  am  possessed 
with  an  overpowering  admiration  and  affection  for 
George  Eliot.  I  don't  know  why  this  has  so  suddenly 
come  over  me,  but  everything  I  look  at  of  hers  now 
adays  makes  me  take  a  deeper  interest  in  her.  I  should 
love  to  see  her,  and  I  hope  Harry  will;  I  asked  him  to 
give  my  love  to  her.  But  I  don't  remember  ever  to 
have  heard  you  speak  of  her.  Good-bye.  I  wish  con 
ventionality  would  invent  some  other  way  of  ending  a 
letter  than  "yours  truly";  I  am  so  tired  of  it,  and  as 
one  says  it  to  one's  shoemaker  it  would  be  rather  more 
complimentary  to  one's  friends  to  dispense  with  it  al 
together  and  just  sign  one's  name  without  anything, 
after  the  manner  of  Miss  Emerson  and  other  free 
Boston  citizens.  But  I  am  a  slave  to  conventionality, 
and  after  all  am  yours  truly.  .  .  . 

Singularly  present  has  remained  to  "Harry," 
as  may  be  imagined,  the  rapid  visit  he  paid  her 
at  Pelham  that  February;  he  was  spending  a 
couple  of  days  in  New  York,  on  a  quick  decision, 
before  taking  ship  for  England.  I  was  then  to 
make  in  Europe  no  such  stay  as  she  had  forecast 
—  I  was  away  but  for  fifteen  months;  though  I 
can  well  believe  my  appetite  must  have  struck 
her  as  open  to  the  boundless,  and  can  easily  be 
touched  again  by  her  generous  thought  of  this 
as  the  right  compensatory  thing  for  me.  That 
indeed  is  what  I  mainly  recall  of  the  hour  I  spent 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    469 

with  her  —  so  unforgettable  none  the  less  in  its 
general  value;  our  so  beautifully  agreeing  that 
quite  the  same  course  would  be  the  right  thing  for 
her  and  that  it  was  wholly  detestable  I  should  be 
voyaging  off  without  her.  But  the  precious 
question  and  the  bright  aspect  of  her  own  still 
waiting  chance  made  our  talk  for  the  time  all 
gaiety;  it  was,  strangely  enough,  a  laughing  hour 
altogether,  coloured  with  the  vision  of  the  next 
winter  in  Rome,  where  we  should  romantically 
meet:  the  appearance  then  being  of  particular 
protective  friends  with  Roman  designs,  under 
whose  wing  she  might  happily  travel.  She  had 
at  that  moment  been  for  many  weeks  as  ill  as 
will  here  have  been  shown;  but  such  is  the  price 
less  good  faith  of  youth  that  we  perfectly  kept  at 
bay  together  the  significance  of  this.  I  recall  no 
mortal  note  —  nothing  but  the  bright  extrava 
gance  of  her  envy;  and  see  her  again,  in  the  old- 
time  Pelham  parlours,  ever  so  erectly  slight  and 
so  more  than  needfully,  so  transparently,  fair  (I 
fatuously  took  this  for  "becoming"),  glide  as 
swiftly,  toss  her  head  as  characteristically,  laugh 
to  as  free  a  disclosure  of  the  handsome  largeish 
teeth  that  made  her  mouth  almost  the  main  fact 
of  her  face,  as  if  no  corner  of  the  veil  of  the  future 
had  been  lifted.  The  house  was  quiet  and 
spacious  for  the  day,  after  the  manner  of  all 
American  houses  of  that  age  at  those  hours,  and 


470    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

yet  spoke  of  such  a  possible  muster  at  need  of 
generous,  gregarious,  neighbouring,  sympathising 
Emmets;  in  spite  of  which,  withal,  the  impression 
was  to  come  back  to  me  as  of  a  child  struggling 
with  her  ignorance  in  a  sort  of  pathless  desert  of 
the  genial  and  the  casual.  Three  months  before 
I  returned  to  America  the  struggle  had  ended. 
I  was,  as  happened,  soon  to  see  in  London  her 
admiration,  and  my  own,  the  great  George  Eliot 
—  a  brief  glimpse  then,  but  a  very  impressive, 
and  wellnigh  my  main  satisfaction  in  which  was 
that  I  should  have  my  cousin  to  tell  of  it.  I 
found  the  Charles  Nortons  settled  for  the  time  in 
London,  with  social  contacts  and  penetrations, 
a  give  and  take  of  hospitality,  that  I  felt  as 
wondrous  and  of  some  elements  of  which  they 
offered  me,  in  their  great  kindness,  the  benefit; 
so  that  I  was  long  to  value  having  owed  them  in 
the  springtime  of  '69  five  separate  impressions  of 
distinguished  persons,  then  in  the  full  flush  of 
activity  and  authority,  that  affected  my  young 
provincialism  as  a  positive  fairytale  of  privilege. 
I  had  a  Sunday  afternoon  hour  with  Mrs.  Lewes 
at  North  Bank,  no  second  visitor  but  my  gentle 
introducer,  the  younger  Miss  Norton,  sharing  the 
revelation,  which  had  some  odd  and  for  myself 
peculiarly  thrilling  accompaniments;  and  then 
the  opportunity  of  dining  with  Mr.  Ruskin  at 
Denmark  Hill,  an  impression  of  uneffaced  inten- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    471 

sity  and  followed  by  a  like  —  and  yet  so  unlike  - 
evening  of  hospitality  from  William  Morris  in  the 
medieval  mise-en-scene  of  Queen  Square.  This 
had  been  preceded  by  a  luncheon  with  Charles 
Darwin,  beautifully  benignant,  sublimely  simple, 
at  Down;  a  memory  to  which  I  find  attached  our 
incidental  wondrous  walk  —  Mrs.  Charles  Norton, 
the  too  near  term  of  her  earthly  span  then  smoothly 
out  of  sight,  being  my  guide  for  the  happy  excur 
sion  —  across  a  private  park  of  great  oaks,  which  I 
conceive  to  have  been  the  admirable  Holwood 
and  where  I  knew  my  first  sense  of  a  matter 
afterwards,  through  fortunate  years,  to  be  more 
fully  disclosed:  the  springtime  in  such  places, 
the  adored  footpath,  the  first  primroses,  the  stir 
and  scent  of  renascence  in  the  watered  sunshine 
and  under  spreading  boughs  that  were  somehow 
before  aught  else  the  still  reach  of  remembered 
lines  of  Tennyson,  ached  over  in  nostalgic  years. 
The  rarest  hour  of  all  perhaps,  or  at  least  the 
strangest,  strange  verily  to  the  pitch  of  the 
sinister,  was  a  vision,  provided  by  the  same  care, 
of  D.  G.  Rossetti  in  the  vernal  dusk  of  Queen's 
House  Chelsea  —  among  his  pictures,  amid  his 
poetry  itself,  his  whole  haunting  "esthetic," 
and  yet  above  all  bristling  with  his  personality, 
with  his  perversity,  with  anything,  as  it  rather 
awfully  seemed  to  me,  but  his  sympathy,  though 
it  at  the  same  time  left  one  oddly  desirous  of  more 


472    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

of  him.  These  impressions  heaped  up  the  measure, 
goodness  knew,  of  what  would  serve  for  Minnie's 
curiosity  —  she  was  familiarly  Minnie  to  us;  the 
point  remaining  all  along,  however,  that,  impa 
tient  at  having  overmuch  to  wait,  I  rejoiced  in 
possession  of  the  exact  vivid  terms  in  which  I 
should  image  George  Eliot  to  her.  I  was  much 
later  on  to  renew  acquaintance  with  that  great 
lady,  but  I  think  I  scarce  exceed  in  saying  that 
with  my  so  interested  cousin's  death  half  the 
savour  of  my  appreciation  had  lost  itself.  Just  in 
those  days,  that  month  of  April,  the  latter  had 
made  a  weak  ineffectual  move  to  Philadelphia  in 
quest  of  physical  relief  -  -  which  expressed  at  the 
same  time  even  more  one  of  those  Teachings  out 
for  appeasement  of  the  soul  which  were  never  too 
publicly  indulged  in,  but  by  which  her  power  to  in 
terest  the  true  subjects  of  her  attraction  was  in 
finitely  quickened.  It  represented  wonderments,  I 
might  well  indeed  have  said  to  myself,  even  beyond 
any  inspired  by  the  high  muse  of  North  Bank. 

I  suppose  I  ought  to  have  something  special  to  say 
after  having  been  suddenly  transplanted  to  a  new  place 
and  among  new  people,  yet  there  isn't  much  to  tell.  I 
came  because  they  all  thought  at  home  that  the  cli 
mate  might  do  me  good;  I  don't  feel,  however,  any 
difference  in  my  sensations  between  this  and  New 
York  —  if  I  do  it's  in  favour  of  New  York.  I  wish  it 
might  turn  out  that  an  inland  climate  isn't  after  all 
necessary  for  me,  as  I  like  the  other  sort  much  better 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    473 

and  really  think  I  feel  stronger  in  it  too.  My  doctor 
told  me  that  Boston  would  kill  me  in  six  months  — 
though  he  is  possibly  mistaken.  I  am  going  to  try  it 
a  little  longer  here,  and  then  go  back  to  Pelham,  where 
I'm  pretty  sure  I  shall  find  myself  better  again.  It 
may  be  that  the  mental  atmosphere  is  more  to  me  than 
any  other,  for  I  feel  homesick  here  all  the  while,  or  at 
least  what  I  call  so,  being  away  from  what  is  most  like 
home  to  me,  and  what  if  I  were  there  I  should  call 
tired.  The  chief  object  I  had  in  coming  was  to  listen 
to  Phillips  Brooks;  I  have  heard  him  several  times 
and  am  not,  I  think,  disappointed.  To  be  sure  he 
didn't  say  anything  new  or  startling,  but  I  certainly 
oughtn't  to  have  expected  that,  though  I  believe  I 
did  have  a  secret  hope  that  he  was  going  to  expound 
to  me  the  old  beliefs  with  a  clearness  that  would  con 
vince  me  for  ever  and  banish  doubt.  I  had  placed  all 
my  hopes  in  him  as  the  one  man  I  had  heard  of  who, 
progressive  in  all  other  ways,  had  yet  been  able  to 
keep  his  faith  firm  in  the  things  that  most  earnest  men 
have  left  far  behind  them.  Yet  in  preaching  to  his 
congregation  he  doesn't,  or  didn't,  touch  the  real 
difficulties  at  all.  He  was  leading  them  forward  in 
stead  of  trying  to  make  it  clear  to  me  that  I  have  any 
good  reason  for  my  feelings.  Still,  it  was  something 
to  feel  that  he  has  them  too,  and  isn't  afraid  to  trust 
them  and  live  for  them.  I  wonder  what  he  really  does 
believe  or  think  about  it  all,  and  whether  he  knows  the 
reaction  that  comes  to  me  about  Thursday,  after  the 
enthusiasm  and  confidence  made  by  his  eloquence  and 
earnestness  on  Sunday.  To-morrow  will  be  Satur 
day,  and  I  shall  be  glad  when  Sunday  comes  to  wind 
me  up  again.  I  feel  sadly  run  down  to-night  and  as 
if  I  should  like  to  see  some  honest  old  pagan  and 
shake  him  by  the  hand.  It  will  seem  all  right  and  easy 
again  soon,  I  know,  but  is  it  always  thus?  Is  there 


474    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

no  more  of  that  undoubting  faith  in  the  world  that 
there  used  to  be?  But  I  won't  talk  any  more  about 
it  now,  or  I  shan't  sleep;  it  is  getting  late  and  all 
themes  but  the  least  interesting  must  be  put  away. 

"Quaint,"  as  we  now  say,  it  at  this  end  of 
time  seems  to  me  that  Phillips  Brooks,  the  great 
Episcopal  light  of  the  period,  first  in  Philadelphia 
and  then  in  Boston,  and  superior  character, 
excellent,  even  ardent,  thoughtful,  genial,  prac 
tical  man,  should  have  appeared  to  play  before  her 
a  light  possibly  of  the  clear  strain,  the  rich  abun 
dance,  the  straight  incidence,  that  she  so  desired 
to  think  attainable.  A  large,  in  fact  an  enormous, 
softly  massive  and  sociably  active  presence,  of 
capacious  attention  and  comforting  suggestion, 
he  was  a  brave  worker  among  those  who  didn't 
too  passionately  press  their  questions  and  claims 
-  half  the  office  of  such  a  minister  being,  no  doubt, 
to  abate  the  high  pitch,  and  the  high  pitch  being 
by  the  same  token  too  much  Minnie's  tendency. 
She  was  left  with  it  in  the  smug  Philadelphia 
visibly  on  her  hands;  she  had  found  there  after 
all  but  a  closed  door,  to  which  she  was  blandly 
directed,  rather  than  an  open,  and  the  sigh  of  her 
falling  back  with  her  disappointment  seems  still 
to  reach  one's  ears.  She  found  them  too  much 
all  round,  the  stiff  blank  barriers  that,  for  what 
ever  thumping,  didn't  "give;"  and  in  fine  I  like 
not  too  faintly  to  colour  this  image  of  her  as 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    475 

failing,  in  her  avid  young  sincerity,  to  draw  from 
the  honest  pastor  of  more  satisfied  souls  any 
assurance  that  she  could  herself  honestly  apply. 
I  confess  that  her  particular  recorded  case,  slender 
enough  in  its  lonely  unrest,  suggests  to  me  a  force, 
or  at  least  a  play,  of  effective  criticism  more  vivid 
to-day  than  either  of  the  several  rich  monuments, 
honourably  as  these  survive,  to  Phillips  Brooks's 
positive  "success."  She  had  no  occasion  or  no 
chance  to  find  the  delightful  harmonising  friend 
in  him  —  which  was  part  of  the  success  for  so  many 
others.  But  her  letter  goes  on  after  a  couple  of 
days  —  she  had  apparently  not  sent  the  previous 
part,  and  it  brings  her  back,  we  can  rejoicingly 
note,  to  George  Eliot,  whose  poem,  alluded  to, 
must  have  been  The  Spanish  Gipsy.  This  work 
may  indeed  much  less  have  counted  for  her  than 
the  all-engulfing  Mill  on  the  Floss,  incomparably 
privileged  production,  which  shone  for  young 
persons  of  that  contemporaneity  with  a  nobleness 
that  nothing  under  our  actual  star  begins  in  like 
case  to  match.  These  are  great  recognitions,  but 
how  can  I  slight  for  them  a  mention  that  has  again 
and  again  all  but  broken  through  in  my  pages? 
-  that  of  Francis  Boott  and  his  daughter  (she  to 
become  later  on  Mrs.  Frank  Duveneck  and  to  yield 
to  the  same  dismal  decree  of  death  before  her  time 
that  rested  on  so  many  of  the  friends  of  our  youth) . 
When  I  turn  in  thought  to  the  happiness  that  our 


476    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

kinswoman  was  still  to  have  known  in  her  short 
life,  for  all  her  disaster,  Elizabeth  Boott,  delight 
ful,  devoted  and  infinitely  under  the  charm,  at 
once  hovers  for  me;  this  all  the  more,  I  hasten  to 
add,  that  we  too  on  our  side,  and  not  least  Mary 
Temple  herself,  were  under  the  charm,  and  that 
that  charm,  if  less  immediately  pointed,  affected 
all  our  young  collective  sensibility  as  a  wondrous 
composite  thing.  There  was  the  charm  for  us  - 
if  I  must  not  again  speak  in  assurance  but  for  my 
self —  that  "Europe,"  the  irrepressible  even  as 
the  ewig  Weibliche  of  literary  allusion  was  irre 
pressible,  had  more  than  anything  else  to  do 
with;  and  then  there  was  the  other  that,  strange 
to  say  (strange  as  I,  once  more,  found  myself 
feeling  it)  owed  nothing  of  its  authority  to  any 
thing  so  markedly  out  of  the  picture.  The  spell 
to  which  I  in  any  case  most  piously  sacrificed, 
most  cultivated  the  sense  of,  was  ever  of  this 
second  cast  —  and  for  the  simple  reason  that  the 
other,  serene  in  its  virtue,  fairly  insolent  in  its 
pride,  needed  no  rites  and  no  care.  It  must  be 
allowed  that  there  was  nothing  composite  in  any 
spell  proceeding,  whether  directly  or  indirectly, 
from  the  great  Albany  connection:  this  form 
of  the  agreeable,  through  whatever  appeals, 
could  certainly  not  have  been  more  of  a  piece, 
as  we  say  —  more  of  a  single  superfused  com 
plexion,  an  element  or  principle  that  we  could 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    477 

in  the  usual  case  ever  so  easily  and  pleasantly 
account  for.     The  case  of  that  one  in  the  large 
number  of  my  cousins  whom  we  have  seen  to  be 
so  incomparably  the  most  interesting  was  of  course 
anything  but  the  usual;    yet  the  Albany  origin, 
the  woodnote  wild,  sounded  out  even  amid  her 
various  voices  and  kept  her  true,  in  her  way,  to 
something   we   could   only   have   called   local,   or 
perhaps  family,  type.     Essentially,  however,  she 
had   been   a   free   incalculable   product,    a   vivid 
exception  to  rules  and  precedents;    so  far  as  she 
had  at  all  the  value  of  the  "composite5'  it  was  on 
her  own  lines  altogether  —  the  composition  was  of 
things  that  had  lain  nearest  to  hand.    It  mattered 
enormously  for  such  a  pair  as  the  Bootts,  inti 
mately  associated  father  and  daughter,  that  what 
had  lain  nearest  their  hand,  or  at  least  that  of 
conspiring  nature  and  fortune  in  preparing  them 
for  our  consumption,  had  been  the  things  of  old 
Italy,  of  the  inconceivable  Tuscany,  that  of  the 
but  lately  expropriated  Grand  Dukes  in  particular, 
and  that  when  originally  alighting  among  us  en 
plein  Newport  they   had   seemed  fairly   to   reek 
with    a    saturation,    esthetic,    historic,    romantic, 
that    everything    roundabout    made    precious.     I 
was  to  apprehend  in  due  course,  and  not  without 
dismay,  that  what  they  really  most  reeked  with 
was  the  delight  of  finding  us  ourselves  exactly  as 
we  were;    they  fell  so  into  the  wondrous  class  of 


478    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

inverted  romantics,  several  other  odd  flowers  of 
which  I  was  later  on  to  have  anxiously  to  deal 
with:  we  and  our  large  crude  scene  of  barbaric 
plenty,  as  it  might  have  been  called,  beguiled 
them  to  appreciations  such  as  made  our  tribute 
to  themselves  excite  at  moments  their  impatience 
and  strike  them  as  almost  silly.  It  was  our  con 
ditions  that  were  picturesque,  and  I  had  to  make 
the  best  of  a  time  when  they  themselves  appeared 
to  consent  to  remain  so  but  by  the  beautiful 
gaiety  of  their  preference.  This,  I  remember 
well,  I  found  disconcerting,  so  that  my  main 
affectionate  business  with  them  became,  under 
amusement  by  the  way,  that  of  keeping  them  true 
to  type.  What  above  all  contributed  was  that 
they  really  couldn't  help  their  case,  try  as  they 
would  to  shake  off  the  old  infection;  they  were 
of  "old  world"  production  through  steps  it  was 
too  late  to  retrace;  and  they  were  in  the  practical 
way  and  in  the  course  of  the  very  next  years  to 
plead  as  guilty  to  this  as  the  highest  proper 
standard  for  them  could  have  prescribed.  They 
"went  back,"  and  again  and  again,  with  a 
charming,  smiling,  pleading  inconsequence  —  any 
pretext  but  the  real  one,  the  fact  that  the  prime 
poison  was  in  their  veins,  serving  them  at  need; 
so  that,  as  the  case  turned,  all  my  own  earlier 
sense,  on  the  spot,  of  Florence  and  Rome  was  to 
mix  itself  with  their  delightfully  rueful  presence 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    479 

there.  I  could  then  perfectly  put  up  with  that 
flame  of  passion  for  Boston  and  Newport  in  them 
which  still  left  so  perfect  their  adaptability  to 
Italian  installations  that  would  have  been  impos 
sible  save  for  subtle  Italian  reasons. 

I  speak  of  course  but  of  the  whole  original 
view:  time  brings  strange  revenges  and  contra 
dictions,  and  all  the  later  history  was  to  be  a 
chapter  by  itself  and  of  the  fullest.  We  had  been 
all  alike  accessible  in  the  first  instance  to  the  call 
of  those  references  which  played  through  their 
walk  and  conversation  with  an  effect  that  their 
qualifying  ironies  and  amusing  reactions,  where 
such  memories  were  concerned,  couldn't  in  the 
least  abate;  for  nothing  in  fact  lent  them  a 
happier  colour  than  just  this  ability  to  afford  so 
carelessly  to  cheapen  the  certain  treasure  of  their 
past.  They  had  enough  of  that  treasure  to  give 
it  perpetually  away  —  in  our  subsequently  to  be 
more  determined,  our  present,  sense;  in  short  we 
had  the  fondest  use  for  their  leavings  even  when 
they  themselves  hadn't.  Mary  Temple,  with  her 
own  fine  quality  so  far  from  composite,  rejoiced  in 
the  perception,  however  unassisted  by  any  sort 
of  experience,  of  what  their  background  had 
"meant";  she  would  have  liked  to  be  able  to 
know  just  that  for  herself,  as  I  have  already 
hinted,  and  I  actually  find  her  image  most  touch 
ing  perhaps  by  its  so  speaking  of  what  she  with  a 


480    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

peculiar  naturalness  dreamed  of  and  missed.  Of 
clear  old  English  stock  on  her  father's  side,  her 
sense  for  what  was  English  in  life  —  so  we  used  to 
simplify  —  was  an  intimate  part  of  her,  little 
chance  as  it  enjoyed  for  happy  verifications.  In 
the  Bootts,  despite  their  still  ampler  and  more 
recently  attested  share  in  that  racial  strain,  the 
foreign  tradition  had  exceedingly  damped  the 
English,  which  didn't  however  in  the  least  prevent 
her  being  caught  up  by  it  as  it  had  stamped  itself 
upon  the  admirable,  the  infinitely  civilised  and 
sympathetic,  the  markedly  produced  Lizzie.  This 
delightful  girl,  educated,  cultivated,  accomplished, 
toned  above  all,  as  from  steeping  in  a  rich  old 
medium,  to  a  degree  of  the  rarest  among  her 
coevals  "on  our  side,''  had  the  further,  the  supreme 
grace  that  she  melted  into  American  opportunities 
of  friendship  —  and  small  blame  to  her,  given  such 
as  she  then  met  —  with  the  glee  of  a  sudden  scarce 
believing  discoverer.  Tuscany  could  only  swoon 
away  under  comparison  of  its  starved  sociabilities 
and  complacent  puerilities,  the  stress  of  which 
her  previous  years  had  so  known,  with  the  multi 
plied  welcomes  and  freedoms,  the  exquisite  and 
easy  fellowships  that  glorified  to  her  the  home 
scene.  Into  not  the  least  of  these  quick  affinities 
had  her  prompt  acquaintance  with  Mary  Temple 
confidently  ripened ;  and  with  no  one  in  the  after- 
time,  so  long  as  that  too  escaped  the  waiting 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    481 

shears,  was  I  to  find  it  more  a  blest  and  sacred 
rite,  guarded  by  no  stiff  approaches,  to  celebrate 
my  cousin's  memory.  That  really  is  my  apology 
for  this  evocation  —  which  might  under  straighter 
connections  have  let  me  in  still  deeper;  since  if  I 
have  glanced  on  another  page  of  the  present  mis 
cellany  at  the  traps  too  often  successfully  set  for 
my  wandering  feet  my  reader  will  doubtless  here 
recognise  a  perfect  illustration  of  our  danger  and  i 
will  accuse  me  of  treating  an  inch  of  canvas  to  an  I 
acre  of  embroidery.  Let  the  poor  canvas  figure 
time  and  the  embroidery  figure  consciousness  - 
the  proportion  will  perhaps  then  not  strike  us  as 
so  wrong.  Consciousness  accordingly  still  grips 
me  to  the  point  of  a  felt  pressure  of  interest  in  such 
a  matter  as  the  recoverable  history  -  -  history  in 
the  esthetic  connection  at  least  —  of  its  insistent 
dealings  with  a  given  case.  How  in  the  course  of 
time  for  instance  was  it  not  insistently  to  deal, 
for  a  purpose  of  application,  with  the  fine  prime 
image  deposited  all  unwittingly  by  the  "pictur 
esque"  (as  I  absolutely  required  to  feel  it)  Boott 
situation  or  Boott  data?  The  direct  or  vital 
value  of  these  last,  in  so  many  ways,  was  experi 
ential,  a  stored  and  assimilated  thing;  but  the 
seed  of  suggestion  proved  after  long  years  to  have 
kept  itself  apart  in  order  that  it  should  develop 
under  a  particular  breath.  A  not  other  than  lonely 
and  bereft  American,  addicted  to  the  arts  and 


482    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

endowed  for  them,  housed  to  an  effect  of  long 
expatriation  in  a  massive  old  Florentine  villa 
with  a  treasured  and  tended  little  daughter  by 
his  side,  that  was  the  germ  which  for  reasons 
beyond  my  sounding  the  case  of  Frank  Boott  had 
been  appointed  to  plant  deep  down  in  my  vision 
of  things.  So  lodged  it  waited,  but  the  special 
instance,  as  I  say,  had  lodged  it,  and  it  lost 
no  vitality  —  on  the  contrary  it  acquired  every 
patience  —  by  the  fact  that  little  by  little  each  of 
its  connections  above  ground,  so  to  speak,  was 
successively  cut.  Then  at  last  after  years  it 
raised  its  own  head  into  the  air  and  found  its  full 
use  for  the  imagination.  An  Italianate  bereft 
American  with  a  little  moulded  daughter  in  the 
setting  of  a  massive  old  Tuscan  residence  was  at 
the  end  of  years  exactly  what  was  required  by  a 
situation  of  my  own  —  conceived  in  the  light  of 
the  Novel;  and  I  had  it  there,  in  the  authenti 
cated  way,  with  its  essential  fund  of  truth,  at 
once  all  the  more  because  my  admirable  old  friend 
had  given  it  to  me  and  none  the  less  because  he 
had  no  single  note  of  character  or  temper,  not  a 
grain  of  the  non-essential,  in  common  with  my 
Gilbert  Osmond.  This  combination  of  facts  has 
its  shy  interest,  I  think,  in  the  general  imaginative 
or  reproductive  connection  —  testifying  as  it  so 
happens  to  do  on  that  whole  question  of  the 
"putting  of  people  into  books"  as  to  which 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    483 

any  ineptitude  of  judgment  appears  always  in 
order.  I  probably  shouldn't  have  had  the  Gilbert 
Osmonds  at  all  without  the  early  "form"  of  the 
Frank  Bootts,  but  I  still  more  certainly  shouldn't 
have  had  them  with  the  sense  of  my  old  inspirers. 
The  form  had  to  be  disembarrassed  of  that  sense 
and  to  take  in  a  thoroughly  other;  thanks  to 
which  account  of  the  matter  I  am  left  feeling  that 
I  scarce  know  whether  most  to  admire,  for  support 
of  one's  beautiful  business  of  the  picture  of  life, 
the  relation  of  "people"  to  art  or  the  relation  of 
art  to  people.  Adorable  each  time  the  mystery 
of  which  of  these  factors,  as  we  say,  has  the  more 
prevailingly  conduced  to  a  given  effect  —  and  too 
much  adored,  at  any  rate,  I  allow,  when  carrying 
me  so  very  far  away.  I  retrace  my  steps  with 
this  next. 

I  have  made  several  attempts  lately  to  write  you  a 
letter,  but  I  have  given  it  up  after  two  or  three  pages, 
because  I  have  always  been  in  a  blue  state  of  mind  at 
the  time,  and  have  each  time  charitably  decided  before 
it  was  too  late  to  spare  you.  But  if  I  were  to  wait 
until  things  change  to  rose-colour  I  might  perhaps  wait 
till  I  die,  or  longer  even,  in  which  case  your  next  com 
munication  from  me  would  be  a  spiritual  one.  I  am 
going  to  Newport  in  the  early  part  of  May  to  meet  the 
Bootts  —  Henrietta  has  just  come  back  from  there 
delighted  with  her  visit;  why,  heaven  knows,  I  sup 
pose,  but  I  don't  —  except  that  she  is  in  that  bliss 
ful  state  of  babyhood  peculiar  to  herself  where  every 
thing  seems  delightful.  ...  I  like  George  Eliot  not 


484    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

through  her  poem  so  much,  not  nearly  so  much,  as 
through  her  prose.  The  creature  interests  me  per 
sonally,  and  I  feel  a  desire  to  know  something  of  her 
life;  how  far  her  lofty  moral  sentiments  have  served 
her  practically  —  for  instance  in  her  dealings  with 
Lewes.  I  see  that  she  understands  the  character  of 
a  generous  woman,  that  is  of  a  woman  who  believes  in 
generosity  and  who  must  be  that  or  nothing,  and  who 
feels  keenly,  notwithstanding,  how  hard  it  is  practically 
to  follow  this  out,  and  how  (looking  at  it  from  the 
point  of  view  of  comfort  as  far  as  this  world  goes)  it 
"pays"  not  at  all.  We  are  having  weather  quite  like 
summer  and  rather  depressing;  I  don't  feel  very  well 
and  am  always  catching  cold  —  that  is  I  suppose  I 
am,  as  I  have  a  cough  nearly  all  the  time.  As  for 
Phillips  Brooks,  what  you  say  of  him  is,  no  doubt,  all 
true  —  he  didn't  touch  the  main  point  when  7  heard 
him,  at  all  events,  and  that  satisfaction  you  so  kindly 
wish  me  is,  I  am  afraid,  not  to  be  got  from  any  man. 
The  mystery  of  this  world  grows  and  grows,  and  sticks 
out  of  every  apparently  trivial  thing,  instead  of  less 
ening.  I  hope  this  feeling  may  not  be  the  incipient 
stage  of  insanity.  Paul  told  the  truth  when  he  said 
that  now  we  see  through  a  glass,  very  darkly.  I  hope 
and  trust  that  the  rest  may  be  equally  true,  and  that 
some  day  we  shall  see  face  to  face.  You  say  it  is  easy 
to  drown  thought  by  well-doing,  and  is  it  not  also  the 
soundest  philosophy  (so  long  of  course  as  one  doesn't 
humbug  oneself);  since  by  simply  thinking  out  a 
religion  who  has  ever  arrived  at  anything  that  did  not 
leave  one's  heart  empty?  Do  you  ever  see  Willy 
James?  Good-bye. 

Needless  enough  surely  to  declare  that  such 
pages  were  essentially  not  love-letters:  that  they 
could  scarce  have  been  less  so  seems  exactly  part 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    485 

of  their  noble  inevitability,  as  well  as  a  proof 
singularly  interesting  and  charming  that  confident 
friendship  may  obey  its  force  and  insist  on  its  say 
quite  as  much  as  the  sentiment  we  are  apt  to  take, 
as  to  many  of  its  occasions,  for  the  supremely 
vocal.  We  have  so  often  seen  this  latter  beat 
distressfully  about  the  bush  for  something  still 
deficient,  something  in  the  line  of  positive  esteem 
or  constructive  respect,  whether  offered  or  enjoyed, 
that  an  esteem  and  a  respect  such  as  we  here 
apprehend,  explicit  enough  on  either  side  to  dis 
pense  with  those  superlatives  in  which  graceless 
reaction  has  been  known  insidiously  to  lurk, 
peculiarly  refresh  and  instruct  us.  The  fine 
special  quietude  of  the  relation  thus  promoted  in 
a  general  consciousness  of  unrest  —  and  even  if  it 
could  breed  questions  too,  since  a  relation  that 
breeds  none  at  all  is  not  a  living  one  —  was  of  the 
highest  value  to  the  author  of  my  letters,  who  had 
already  sufficiently  "lived,"  in  her  generous  way, 
to  know  well  enough  in  how  different  a  quarter  to 
look  for  the  grand  inconclusive.  The  directness, 
the  ease,  the  extent  of  the  high  consideration,  the 
felt  need  of  it  as  a  support,  indeed  one  may  almost 
say  as  an  inspiration,  in  trouble,  and  the  free  gift 
of  it  as  a  delightful  act  of  intelligence  and  justice, 
render  the  whole  exhibition,  to  my  sense,  admir 
able  in  its  kind.  Questions  luckily  could  haunt  it, 
as  I  say  and  as  we  shall  presently  see,  but  only  to 


486    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

illustrate  the  more  all  the  equilibrium  preserved. 
I  confess  I  can  imagine  no  tribute  to  a  manly 
nature  from  a  feminine  more  final  even  than 
the  confidence  in  "mere"  consideration  here 
embodied  --  the  comfort  of  the  consideration  being 
in  the  fact  that  the  character  with  which  the 
feminine  nature  was  dealing  lent  it,  could  it  but 
come,  such  weight.  We  seem  to  see  play  through 
the  whole  appeal  of  the  younger  person  to  the 
somewhat  older  an  invocation  of  the  weight 
suspended,  weight  of  judgment,  weight  of  experi 
ence  and  authority,  and  which  may  ever  so  quietly 
drop.  How  kindly  in  another  relation  it  had  been 
in  fact  capable  of  dropping  comes  back  to  me  in 
the  mention  of  my  brother  Wilky,  as  to  whom 
this  aspect  of  his  admiring  friendship  for  our 
young  relative's  correspondent,  the  fruit  of  their 
common  military  service  roundabout  Charleston, 
again  comprehensively  testifies.  That  comrade 
ship  was  a  privilege  that  Wilky  strongly  cherished, 
as  well  as  what  one  particularly  liked  to  think  for 
him  of  his  having  known  —  he  was  to  have  known 
nothing  more  fortunate.  In  no  less  a  degree  was 
our  elder  brother  to  come  to  prize  his  like  share  in 
the  association  --  this  being  sufficiently  indicated, 
for  that  matter,  in  the  note  I  have  quoted  from 
him.  That  I  have  prized  my  own  share  in  it  let 
my  use  of  this  benefit  derived  strongly  represent. 
But  again  for  Minnie  herself  the  sadder  admoni- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    487 

tion  is  sharp,  and  I  find  I  know  not  what  lonely 
pluck  in  her  relapses  shaken  off  as  with  the  jangle 
of  silver  bells,  her  expert  little  efforts  to  live  them 
down,  Newport  and  other  matters  aiding  and  the 
general  preoccupied  good  will  all  vainly  at  her 
service.  Pitiful  in  particular  her  carrying  her 
trouble  experimentally  back  to  the  Newport  of 
the  first  gladness  of  her  girlhood  and  of  the  old 
bright  spectacle. 

I  know  quite  well  I  don't  owe  you  a  letter,  and  that 
the  custom  for  maidens  is  to  mete  out  strictly  letter 
for  letter;  but  if  you  don't  mind  it  I  don't,  and  if  you 
do  mind  that  kind  of  thing  you  had  better  learn  not 
to  at  once  —  if  you  propose  to  be  a  friend  of  mine;  or 
else  have  your  feelings  from  time  to  time  severely 
shocked.  After  which  preamble  I  will  say  that  there 
is  a  special  reason  in  this  case,  though  there  might  not 
be  in  another. 

She  mentions  having  seen  a  common  friend, 
in  great  bereavement  and  trouble,  who  has  charged 
her  with  a  message  to  her  correspondent  "if  you 
know  of  anything  to  comfort  a  person  when  the 
one  they  love  best  dies,  for  heaven's  sake  say  it  to 
her  —  /  hadn't  a  word  to  say."  And  she  goes  on: 

I  wrote  to  you  that  I  was  going  to  Newport,  and  I 
meant  to  go  next  Tuesday,  but  I  had  another  hemor 
rhage  last  night,  and  it  is  impossible  to  say  when  I 
shall  be  able  to  leave  here.  I  think  I  was  feeling  ill 
when  I  last  wrote  to  you,  and  ever  since  have  been 
coughing  and  feeling  wretchedly,  until  finally  the 


488    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

hemorrhage  has  come.  If  that  goes  over  well  I  think 
I  shall  be  better.  I  am  in  bed  now,  on  the  old  plan  of 
gruel  and  silence,  and  I  may  get  off  without  any  worse 
attack  this  time.  It  is  a  perfect  day,  like  summer  — 
my  windows  are  up  and  the  birds  sing.  It  seems  quite 
out  of  keeping  that  I  should  be  in  bed.  I  should  be 
all  right  if  I  could  only  get  rid  of  coughing.  The  warm 
weather  will  set  me  up  again.  I  wonder  what  you  are 
doing  to-day.  Probably  taking  a  solitary  walk  and 
meditating  —  on  what?  Good-bye. 

But  she  went  to  Newport  after  a  few  days  ap 
parently;   whence  comes  this. 

I  believe  I  was  in  bed  when  I  last  wrote  to  you,  but 
that  attack  didn't  prove  nearly  so  bad  a  one  as  the 
previous;  I  rather  bullied  it,  and  after  the  fourth 
hemorrhage  it  ceased;  moreover  my  cough  is  better 
since  I  came  here.  But  I  am,  to  tell  the  truth,  a  little 
homesick  —  and  am  afraid  I  am  becoming  too  much  of 
a  baby.  Whether  it's  from  illness  or  from  the  natural 
bent  I  know  not,  but  there  is  no  comfort  in  life  away 
from  people  who  care  for  you  —  not  an  heroic  state 
ment,  I  am  fully  aware.  I  hear  that  Wilky  is  at  home, 
and  dare  say  he  will  have  the  kindness  to  run  down  and 
see  me  while  I  am  here;  at  least  I  hope  so.  But  I 
am  not  in  the  mood  for  writing  to-day  —  I  am  tired 
and  can  only  bore  you  if  I  kept  on.  It  is  just  a  year 
since  we  began  to  write,  and  aren't  you  by  this  time 
a  little  tired  of  it?  If  you  are,  say  so  like  a  man  - 
don't  be  afraid  of  me.  Now  I  am  going  to  lie  down 
before  dressing  for  dinner.  Good-bye. 

This  passage  more  than  a  month  later  makes 
me  ask  myself  of  which  of  the  correspondents  it 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    489 

strikes  me  as  most  characteristic.  The  gay  clear 
ness  of  the  one  looks  out  —  as  it  always  looked  out 
on  the  least  chance  given  —  at  the  several  apparent 
screens  of  the  other;  each  of  which  is  indeed 
disconnectedly,  independently  clear,  but  tells  too 
small  a  part  (at  least  for  her  pitch  of  lucidity)  of 
what  they  together  enclose,  and  what  was  quand 
meme  of  so  fine  an  implication.  Delightful  at  the 
same  time  any  page  from  her  that  is  not  one  of  the 
huddled  milestones  of  her  rate  of  decline. 

How  can  I  write  to  you  when  I  have  forgotten  all 
about  you?  —  if  one  can  forget  what  one  has  never 
known.  However,  I  am  not  quite  sure  whether  it 
isn't  knowing  you  too  much  rather  than  too  little 
that  seems  to  prevent.  Do  you  comprehend  the  diffi 
culty?  Of  course  you  don't,  so  I  will  explain.  The 
trouble  is,  I  think,  that  to  me  you  have  no  distinct 
personality.  I  don't  feel  sure  to  whom  I  am  writing 
when  I  say  to  myself  that  I  will  write  to  you.  I  see 
mentally  three  men,  all  answering  to  your  name,  each 
liable  to  read  my  letters  and  yet  differing  so  much 
from  each  other  that  if  it  is  proper  for  one  of  them  it's 
quite  unsuitable  to  the  others.  Do  you  see?  If  you 
can  once  settle  for  me  the  question  of  which  gets  my 
letters  I  shall  know  better  what  to  say  in  them.  Is  it 
the  man  I  used  to  see  (I  can't  say  know)  at  Conway, 
who  had  a  beard,  I  think,  and  might  have  been  middle- 
aged,  and  who  discussed  Trollope's  novels  with  Kitty 
and  Elly?  This  was  doubtless  one  of  the  best  of 
men,  but  he  didn't  interest  me,  I  never  felt  disposed 
to  speak  to  him,  and  used  to  get  so  sleepy  in  his  society 
at  about  eight  o'clock  that  I  wondered  how  the  other 
girls  could  stay  awake  till  eleven.  Is  it  that  person 


490    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

who  reads  my  letters?  Or  is  it  the  young  man  I 
recently  saw  at  Newport,  with  a  priestly  countenance, 
calm  and  critical,  with  whom  I  had  certainly  no  fault 
to  find  as  a  chance  companion  for  three  or  four  days, 
but  whom  I  should  never  have  dreamt  of  writing  to  or 
bothering  with  my  affairs  one  way  or  the  other,  happi 
ness  or  no  happiness,  as  he  would  doubtless  at  once 
despise  me  for  my  nonsense  and  wonder  at  me  for  my 
gravity?  Does  he  get  my  letters?  —  or  is  it  finally 
the  being  who  has  from  time  to  time  himself  written 
to  me,  signing  by  the  same  name  that  the  other  gen 
tlemen  appropriate?  If  my  correspondent  is  this 
last  I  know  where  I  stand  —  and,  please  heaven,  shall 
stand  there  some  time  longer.  Him  I  won't  describe, 
but  he's  the  only  one  of  the  three  I  care  anything  about. 
My  only  doubt  is  because  I  always  address  him  at 
Pemberton  Square,  and  I  think  him  the  least  likely  of 
the  three  to  go  there  much.  But  good-bye,  which 
ever  you  are! 

It  was  not  at  any  rate  to  be  said  of  her  that  she 
didn't  live  surrounded,  even  though  she  had  to  go 
so  far  afield  —  very  far  it  may  at  moments  have 
appeared  to  her  —  for  the  freedom  of  talk  that  was 
her  greatest  need  of  all.  How  happily  and  hilari 
ously  surrounded  this  next,  of  the  end  of  the 
following  August,  and  still  more  its  sequel  of  the 
mid-September,  abundantly  bring  back  to  me; 
so  in  the  habit  were  the  numerous  Emmets,  it 
might  almost  be  said,  of  marrying  the  numerous 
young  women  of  our  own  then  kinship:  they  at 
all  events  formed  mainly  by  themselves  at  that 
time  the  figures  and  the  action  of  her  immediate 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    491 

scene.  The  marriage  of  her  younger  sister  was 
as  yet  but  an  engagement  —  to  the  brother-in-law 
of  the  eldest,  already  united  to  Richard  Emmet 
and  with  Temple  kinship,  into  the  bargain,  play 
ing  between  the  pairs.  All  of  which  animation  of 
prospective  and  past  wedding-bells,  with  what 
ever  consolidation  of  pleasant  ties,  couldn't  quench 
her  ceaseless  instinct  for  the  obscurer  connections 
of  things  or  keep  passionate  reflections  from 
awaiting  her  at  every  turn.  This  disposition  in 
her,  and  the  way  in  which,  at  the  least  push,  the 
gate  of  thought  opened  for  her  to  its  widest,  which 
was  to  the  prospect  of  the  soul  and  the  question  of 
interests  on  its  part  that  wouldn't  be  ignored,  by 
no  means  fails  to  put  to  me  that  she  might  well 
have  found  the  mystifications  of  life,  had  she  been 
appointed  to  enjoy  more  of  them,  much  in  excess 
of  its  contentments.  It  easily  comes  up  for  us 
over  the  relics  of  those  we  have  seen  beaten,  this 
sense  that  it  was  not  for  nothing  they  missed  the 
ampler  experience,  but  in  no  case  that  I  have 
known  has  it  come  up  for  me  so  much.  In  none 
other  have  I  so  felt  the  naturalness  of  our  asking 
ourselves  what  such  spirits  would  have  done  with 
their  extension  and  what  would  have  satisfied 
them;  since  dire  as  their  defeat  may  have  been 
we  don't  see  them,  in  the  ambiguous  light  of  some 
of  their  possibilities,  at  peace  with  victory.  This 
may  be  perhaps  an  illusion  of  our  interest  in  them, 


492    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

a  mere  part  of  its  ingenuity;  and  I  allow  that  if 
our  doubt  is  excessive  it  does  them  a  great  wrong 
—  which  is  another  way  in  which  they  were  not  to 
have  been  righted.  We  soothe  a  little  with  it  at 
any  rate  our  sense  of  the  tragic. 

.  .  .  The  irretrievableness  of  the  step  (her  sister 
E.'s  marriage)  comes  over  my  mind  from  time  to  time 
in  such  an  overwhelming  way  that  it's  most  depressing, 
and  I  have  to  be  constantly  on  my  guard  not  to  let 
Temple  and  Elly  see  it,  as  it  would  naturally  not  please 
them.  After  all,  since  they  are  not  appalled  at  what 
they've  done,  and  are  quite  sure  of  each  other,  as  they 
evidently  are,  why  should  I  worry  myself?  I  am  well 
aware  that  if  all  other  women  felt  the  seriousness  of  the 
matter  to  the  extent  I  do,  hardly  any  would  ever 
marry,  and  the  human  race  would  stop  short.  So  I 
ought  perhaps  to  be  glad  so  many  people  can  find  and 
take  that  "little  ease"  that  Clough  talks  about,  with 
out  consciously  giving  up  the  "highest  thing."  And 
may  not  this  majority  of  people  be  the  truly  wise  and 
my  own  notions  of  the  subject  simply  fanatical  and 
impracticable?  I  clearly  see  in  how  small  a  minority 
I  am,  and  that  the  other  side  has,  with  Bishop  Blou- 
gram,  the  best  of  it  from  one  point  of  view;  but  I 
can't  help  that,  can  I?  We  must  be  true  to  ourselves, 
mustn't  we?  though  all  the  rest  of  humanity  be  of  a 
contrary  opinion,  or  else  throw  discredit  upon  the 
wisdom  of  God,  who  made  us  as  we  are  and  not  like 
the  next  person.  Do  you  remember  my  old  hobby  of 
the  "remote  possibility  of  the  best  thing"  being  better 
than  a  clear  certainty  of  the  second  best?  Well,  I 
believe  it  more  than  ever,  every  day  I  live.  Indeed 
I  don't  believe  anything  else  —  but  is  not  that  every 
thing?  And  isn't  it  exactly  what  Christianity  means? 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    493 

Wasn't  Christ  the  only  man  who  ever  lived  and  died 
entirely  for  his  faith,  without  a  shadow  of  selfishness? 
And  isn't  that  reason  enough  why  we  should  all  turn 
to  Him  after  having  tried  everything  else  and  found  it 
wanting?  —  turn  to  Him  as  the  only  pure  and  unmixed 
manifestation  of  God  in  humanity?  And  if  I  believe 
this,  which  I  think  I  do,  how  utterly  inconsistent  and 
detestable  is  the  life  I  lead,  which,  so  far  from  being  a 
loving  and  cheerful  surrender  of  itself  once  for  all  to 
God's  service,  is  at  best  but  a  base  compromise  —  a 
few  moments  or  acts  or  thoughts  consciously  and  with 
difficulty  divested  of  actual  selfishness.  Must  this 
always  be  so?  Is  it  owing  to  the  indissoluble  mixture 
of  the  divine  and  the  diabolical  in  us  all,  or  is  it  because 
I  myself  am  hopelessly  frivolous  and  trifling?  Or  is 
it  finally  that  I  really  don't  believe,  that  I  have  still  a 
doubt  in  my  mind  whether  religion  is  the  one  exclusive 
thing  to  live  for,  as  Christ  taught  us,  or  whether  it 
will  prove  to  be  only  one  of  the  influences,  though  a 
great  one,  which  educate  the  human  race  and  help  it 
along  in  that  culture  which  Matthew  Arnold  thinks 
the  most  desirable  thing  in  the  world?  In  fine  is  it  the 
meaning  and  end  of  our  lives,  or  only  a  moral  prin 
ciple  bearing  a  certain  part  in  our  development  —  -  ? 
Since  I  wrote  this  I  have  been  having  my  tea  and 
sitting  on  the  piazza  looking  at  the  stars  and  thinking 
it  most  unfaithful  and  disloyal  of  me  even  to  speak 
as  I  did  just  now,  admitting  the  possibility  of  that 
faith  not  being  everything  which  yet  at  moments  is 
so  divinely  true  as  to  light  up  the  whole  of  life  sud 
denly  and  make  everything  clear.  I  know  the  trouble 
is  with  me  when  doubt  and  despondency  come,  but  on 
the  other  hand  I  can't  altogether  believe  it  wrong  of 
me  to  have  written  as  I  have,  for  then  what  becomes 
of  my  principle  of  saying  what  one  really  thinks  and 
leaving  it  to  God  to  take  care  of  his  own  glory?  The 


494     NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

truth  will  vindicate  itself  in  spite  of  my  voice  to  the 
contrary.  If  you  think  I  am  letting  myself  go  this 
way  without  sufficient  excuse  I  won't  do  it  again; 
but  I  can't  help  it  this  time,  I  have  nobody  else  to 
speak  to  about  serious  things.  If  by  chance  I  say 
anything  or  ask  a  question  that  lies  at  all  near  my 
heart  my  sisters  all  tell  me  I  am  "queer"  and  that 
they  "wouldn't  be  me  for  anything"  —  which  is,  no 
doubt,  sensible  on  their  part,  but  which  puts  an  end  to 
anything  but  conversation  of  the  most  superficial 
kind  on  mine.  You  know  one  gets  lonely  after  a  while 
on  such  a  plan  of  living,  so  in  sheer  desperation  I  break 
out  where  I  perhaps  more  safely  can. 

Such  is  the  magic  of  old  letters  on  its  subtlest 
occasions  that  I  reconstitute  in  every  detail,  to 
a  vivid  probability  —  even  if  I  may  not  again 
proportionately  project  the  bristling  image  —  our 
scene  of  next  mention;  drawing  for  this  upon 
my  uneffaced  impression  of  a  like  one,  my  cousin 
Katharine  Temple's  bright  nuptials,  in  the  same 
general  setting,  very  much  before,  and  in  addition 
seeming  to  see  the  very  muse  of  history  take  a 
fresh  scroll  in  order  to  prepare  to  cover  it,  in  her 
very  handsomest  hand,  well  before  my  eyes. 
Covered  is  it  now  for  me  with  that  abounding  and 
interesting  life  of  the  generations  then  to  come 
at  the  pair  of  preliminary  flourishes  ushering  in 
the  record  of  which  I  thus  feel  myself  still  assist. 

But  a  line  to-day  to  tell  you  that  Elly  was  safely 
married  on  Wednesday.  She  looked  simply  beautiful 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    495 

in  her  wedding  garment,  and  behaved  herself  through 
out  with  a  composure  that  was  as  delightful  as  it  was 
surprising.  I  send  you  a  photograph  of  myself  that  I 
had  taken  a  few  weeks  ago.  It  looks  perhaps  a  trifle 
melancholy,  but  I  can't  help  that  —  I  did  the  best  I 
could.  But  I  won't  write  more  —  it  wouldn't  be  en 
livening.  Everything  looks  grey  and  blue  in  the  world 
nowadays.  It  will  all  be  bright  again  in  time,  I  have 
no  doubt;  there  is  no  special  reason  for  it;  I  think  I 
am  simply  tired  with  knocking  about.  Yet  my  week 
in  Newport  might  have  been  pleasant  enough  if  the 
dentist  hadn't  taken  that  occasion  to  break  my  bones 
for  me  in  a  barbarous  manner.  You  are  very  kind 
and  friendly  to  me  —  you  don't  know  how  much  happi 
ness  your  letters  give  me.  You  will  be  surprised,  I 
dare  say,  but  I  shall  not,  at  the  last  day,  when  the  ac 
counts  are  all  settled,  to  find  how  much  this  counts  in 
your  favour.  Good-bye. 

I  find  my  story  so  attaching  that  I  prize  every 
step  of  its  course,  each  note  of  which  hangs  together 
with  all  the  others.  The  writer  is  expressed  to 
my  vision  in  every  word,  and  the  resulting  image 
so  worth  preserving.  Much  of  one's  service  to  it 
is  thus  a  gathering-in  of  the  ever  so  faded  ashes 
of  the  happiness  that  did  come  to  her  after  all  in 
snatches.  Everything  could  well,  on  occasion, 
look  "grey  and  blue,"  as  she  says;  yet  there  were 
stretches,  even  if  of  the  briefest,  when  other  things 
still  were  present  than  the  active  symptoms  of 
her  state.  The  photograph  that  she  speaks  of 
above  is  before  me  as  I  write  and  blessedly  helpful 
to  memory  —  so  that  I  am  moved  to  reproduce  it 


496    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

only  till  I  feel  again  how  the  fondness  of  memory 
must  strike  the  light  for  apprehension.  The  plan 
of  the  journey  to  California  for  the  advantage  of 
the  climate  there  was,  with  other  plans  taken  up 
and  helplessly  dropped,  but  beguiling  for  the  day, 
to  accompany  her  almost  to  the  end. 

The  Temple-Emmet  caravan  have  advanced  as  far 
as  Newport  and  now  propose  to  retreat  again  to  Pel- 
ham  without  stopping  at  Boston  or  anywhere  else. 
My  brother-in-law  has  business  in  New  York  and 
can't  be  away  any  longer.  I  haven't  been  well  of 
late,  or  I  should  have  run  up  to  Boston  for  a  day  or 
two  to  take  a  sad  farewell  of  all  I  love  in  that  city 
and  thereabouts  before  I  cross  the  Rocky  Mountains. 
This  little  trip  has  been  made  out  for  me  by  my  friends; 
I  have  determined  to  go,  and  shall  probably  start 
with  Elly  and  Temple  in  about  ten  days,  possibly  not 
for  a  fortnight,  to  spend  the  winter  in  San  Francisco. 
I  can't  be  enthusiastic  about  it,  but  suppose  I  might 
as  well  take  all  the  means  I  can  to  get  better:  a  winter 
in  a  warm  climate  may  be  good  for  me.  In  short  I 
am  going,  and  now  what  I  want  you  to  do  about  it  is 
simply  to  come  and  see  us  before  that.  Kitty  is  going 
to  send  you  a  line  to  add  her  voice  —  perhaps  that 
may  bring  you.  You  may  never  see  me  again,  you 
know,  and  if  I  were  to  die  so  far  away  you'd  be  sorry 
you  hadn't  taken  leave  of  me,  wouldn't  you? 

The  idea  of  California  held,  and  with  other 
pleasant  matters  really  occupied  the  scene;  out 
of  which  moreover  insist  on  shining  to  me  acces 
sory  connections,  or  connections  that  then  were 
to  be:  intensely  distinct  for  example  the  figure 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    497 

of  Miss  Crawford,  afterwards  Madame  von  Rabe, 
sister  of  my  eminent  friend  F.  Marion  of  the  name 
and,  in  her  essence,  I  think,  but  by  a  few  shades 
less  entire  a  figure  than  he  —  which  is  saying  much. 
The  most  endowed  and  accomplished  of  men 
Frank  Crawford,  so  that  I  have  scarcely  known 
another  who  had  more  aboundingly  lived  and 
wrought,  about  whom  moreover  there  was  singu 
larly  more  to  be  said,  it  struck  me,  than  at  all 
found  voice  at  the  time  he  might  have  been 
commemorated.  Therefore  if  the  young  lady 
alluded  to  in  my  cousin's  anecdote  was  at  all  of 
the  same  personal  style  and  proportion  —  well,  I 
should  draw  the  moral  if  it  didn't  represent  here 
too  speciously  the  mouth  of  a  trap,  one  of  those  I 
have  already  done  penance  for;  the  effect  of  my 
yielding  to  which  would  be  a  shaft  sunk  so  straight 
down  into  matters  interesting  and  admirable  and 
sad  and  strange  that,  with  everything  that  was 
futurity  to  the  occasion  noted  in  our  letter  and 
is  an  infinitely  mixed  and  a  heavily  closed  past 
now,  I  hurry  on  without  so  much  as  a  glance. 

The  present  plan  is  to  send  me  to  California  in  about 
three  weeks  by  water,  under  the  care  of  one  of  the 
Emmet  boys  and  Temple's  valet  —  for  nurse;  and  by 
the  time  I  get  there,  early  in  December,  they  will  be 
settled  in  San  Francisco  for  the  winter.  The  idea  of  a 
twenty-one  days'  sea- voyage  is  rather  appalling  - 
what  do  you  think  of  it?  This  day  is  but  too  heavenly 


498    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

here.  I  haven't  been  to  church,  but  walking  by  my 
self,  as  happy  as  possible.  When  one  sleeps  well  and 
the  sun  shines,  what  happiness  to  live!  I  wish  you 
were  here  —  wouldn't  I  show  you  Pelham  at  high 
tide,  on  a  day  that  is  simply  intoxicating,  with  a 
fresh  breeze  blown  through  the  red  and  yellow  leaves 
and  sunshine  "on  field  and  hill,  in  heart  and  brain,"  as 
Mr.  Lowell  says.  I  suppose  you  remember  the  pony 
I  drove,  and  Punch,  the  little  Scotch  terrier  that  tried 
so  to  insinuate  himself  into  your  affections,  on  the 
piazza,  the  morning  you  left.  The  former  has  been 
"cutting  up,"  the  latter  cut  up,  since  then.  You 
wouldn't  believe  me  when  I  told  you  the  pony  was  a 
highly  nervous  creature  —  but  she  behaved  as  one  the 
other  day  when  I  took  the  Roman  Miss  Crawford,  who 
has  been  staying  near  here,  a  ride.  She  shied  at  a  dog 
that  frightened  her,  and  dragged  the  cart  into  a  ditch, 
and  tried  to  get  over  a  stone  wall,  waggon  and  all.  I  of 
course  had  to  hang  on  to  the  reins,  but  I  suggested  to 
Miss  Crawford  that  she  should  get  out,  as  the  cart  was 
pretty  steady  while  the  horse's  forefeet  were  on  top  of 
the  wall;  which  she  did,  into  a  mud-puddle,  and  soiled 
her  pretty  striped  stockings  and  shoes  in  a  horrible 
way.  It  ended  by  the  dear  little  beast's  consenting  to 
get  back  upon  all  fours,  but  I  found  it  very  amusing 
and  have  liked  her  better  ever  since.  .  .  .  How  does 
Mr.  Holmes  persevere  about  smoking?  I  pity  him  if 
he  can't  sleep,  and  wish  7  had  a  vicious  habit  so  that  I 
might  give  it  up.  But  I  must  finish  my  tale  of  the 
quadruped  Punch,  who  was  called  upon  in  the  dead  of 
night  by  five  dogs  of  the  neighbourhood  and  torn  to 
pieces  by  them.  The  coachman  heard  him  crying  in 
the  night,  and  in  the  morning  we  found  him  —  that 
is  to  say  we  gathered  him  together,  his  dear  little  tail 
from  one  place  and  his  head  from  another  etc!  So 
went  out  a  very  sweet  little  spirit  —  I  wonder  where 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    499 

it  is  now.     Don't  tell  me  he  hadn't  more  of  a  soul  than 
that  Kaufmann,  the  fat  oysterman. 

I  find  bribes  to  recognition  and  recovery  quite 
mercilessly  multiply,  and  with  the  effort  to  brush 
past  them  more  and  more  difficult;  with  the 
sense  for  me  at  any  rate  (whatever  that  may  be 
worth  for  wisdom  or  comfort)  of  sitting  rather 
queerly  safe  and  alone,  though  as  with  a  dangle 
of  legs  over  the  edge  of  a  precipice,  on  the  hither 
side  of  great  gulfs  of  history.  But  these  things, 
dated  toward  the  end  of  that  November,  speak 
now  in  a  manner  for  themselves. 

My  passage  for  California  is  taken  for  the  4th  of 
December;  Elly  and  Temple  have  written  to  me  to 
come  at  once  —  they  are  settled  in  San  Francisco  for 
the  winter.  My  brother-in-law  here  has  been  prom 
ised  that  I  shall  be  made  so  comfortable  I  shan't  want 
to  tear  myself  from  the  ship  when  I  arrive.  The  cap 
tain  is  a  friend  of  Temple's,  and  also  of  my  uncle 
Captain  Temple,  and  both  of  them  are  going  to  ar 
range  so  for  me  that  I  fully  expect  the  ship  to  be  hung 
with  banners  and  flowers  when  I  step  on  board.  .  .  . 
I  enjoyed  my  time  in  Boston  far  more  than  I  had  ex 
pected  —  in  fact  immensely,  and  wouldn't  have  missed 
it  for  anything;  I  feel  now  as  if  it  had  necessarily  had 
to  happen.  I  don't  know  how  I  should  have  done 
the  winter,  and  especially  started  off  for  an  indefinitely 
long  absence  in  the  west  without  the  impetus  that  it 
gave  me  in  certain  directions  —  the  settling  down 
and  shaking  up,  the  dissipating  of  certain  impressions 
that  I  had  thought  fixed  and  the  strengthening  of 
others  that  I  hadn't  been  so  sure  of:  an  epoch  in  short. 


500    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

I  dare  say  you  have  had  such  —  in  which  a  good  deal 
of  living  was  done  in  a  short  time,  to  be  turned  over 
and  made  fruitful  in  days  to  come.  I  saw  Mr.  Holmes 
once,  and  was  very  glad  of  that  glimpse,  short  as  it 
was.  I  went  home  by  way  of  Newport,  where  I  stayed 
two  days  —  and  where  I  was  surprised  to  hear  of  Fred 
Jones's  engagement  to  Miss  Rawle  of  Philadelphia. 
Do  you  know  her?  When  I  got  to  New  York  I  went 
to  the  Hones'  to  ask  something  about  Fred  and  his 
affairs  and  found  that  Miss  Rawle  was  staying  next 
door  with  Mrs.  Willy  Duncan;  so  I  went  in  to  see  her 
on  the  spur  of  the  moment,  very  much  as  I  had  come 
from  the  boat,  not  particularly  presentable  for  a  first 
call :  however,  I  thought  if  she  had  a  soul  she  wouldn't 
mind  it  —  and  such  I  found  the  case.  .  .  .  Lizzie 
Boott  was  as  sweet  and  good  to  me  as  ever;  I  think 
she  is  at  once  the  most  unselfish  and  most  unegotistical 
girl  I  know  —  they  don't  always  go  together. 

What  follows  here  has,  in  its  order,  I  think, 
that  it  still  so  testifies  to  life  —  if  one  doesn't  see 
in  it  indeed  rather  perhaps  the  instinct  on  the 
writer's  part,  though  a  scarce  conscious  one,  to 
wind  up  the  affairs  of  her  spirit,  as  it  were,  and 
be  able  to  turn  over  with  a  sigh  of  supreme  relief 
for  an  end  intimately  felt  as  at  hand.  The  moral 
fermentation  breaking  through  the  bustle  of  out 
ward  questions  even  at  a  time  when  she  might 
have  thrown  herself,  as  one  feels,  on  the  great  soft 
breast  of  equalising  Nature,  or  taken  her  chance  of 
not  being  too  wrong,  is  a  great  stroke  of  truth. 
No  one  really  could  be  less  "morbid";  yet  she 
would  take  no  chance  —  it  wasn't  in  her  —  of  not 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    501 

being  right  with  the  right  persons;    among  whom 
she  so  ranked  her  correspondent. 

My  address  at  San  Francisco  will  be  simply  Care  of 
C.  Temple  Emmet,  Esq.;  and  I  am  surely  off  this 
time  unless  heaven  interposes  in  a  miraculous  way  be 
tween  now  and  Saturday.  I've  no  great  courage 
about  it,  but  after  all  it's  much  the  same  to  me  where 
I  am;  life  is  always  full  of  interest  and  mystery  and 
happiness  to  me,  and  as  for  the  voyage,  the  idea  of 
three  weeks  of  comparative  solitude  between  sea  and 
sky  isn't  unattractive.  ...  I  know  that  by  my  ques 
tion  [as  to  why  he  had  written,  apparently,  that  she 
was,  of  her  nature,  "far  off"  from  him]  I  am  putting 
an  end  to  that  delightful  immunity  I  have  enjoyed  so 
much  with  you  from  sickening  introspection,  analysis 
of  myself  and  yourself,  that  exhausting  and  nauseat 
ing  subjectivity,  with  which  most  of  my  other  friends 
see  fit  to  deluge  me,  thereby  taking  much  that  is  re 
freshing  out  of  life.  Don't  be  afraid  of  "hurting  my 
feelings"  by  anything  you  can  say.  Our  friendship 
has  always  been  to  my  mind  a  one-sided  thing,  and  if 
you  should  tell  me  you  find  me  in  any  way  unsym 
pathetic  or  unsatisfactory  it  won't  disappoint  me,  and 
I  won't  even  allow  myself  to  think  I'm  sorry.  I  feel 
so  clearly  that  God  knows  best,  and  that  we  ought 
neither  of  us  surely  to  wish  to  distort  his  creatures 
from  the  uses  he  made  them  for,  just  to  serve  our  own 
purposes  —  that  is  to  get  a  little  more  sympathy  and 
comfort.  We  must  each  of  us,  after  all,  live  out  our 
own  lives  apart  from  everyone  else;  and  yet,  this  being 
once  understood  as  a  fundamental  truth,  there  is  no 
body's  sympathy  and  approval  that  would  encourage 
me  so  much  as  yours.  I  mean  that  if  one's  heart  and 
motives  could  be  known  by  another  as  God  knows 
them,  without  disguise  or  extenuation,  and  if  it  should 


502    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

then  prove  that  on  the  whole  you  didn't  think  well  of 
me,  it  would,  more  than  anything  else  could,  shake 
my  confidence  in  my  own  instincts,  which  must  after 
all  forever  be  my  guide.  And  yet,  as  I  said  before,  I 
am  quite  prepared  for  the  worst,  and  shall  listen  to  it, 
if  necessary,  quite  humbly.  I  am  very  much  inclined 
to  trust  your  opinion  before  my  own. 

An  hour  later.  Sold  again,  by  all  that's  wonderful 
—  I  had  almost  said  by  all  that's  damnable,  though  it 
isn't  exactly  that.  My  brother  Dick  has  just  walked 
in  with  a  telegram  from  Temple:  "I  shall  be  back  in 
December  —  don't  send  M."  A  tremendous  revul 
sion  of  feeling  and  a  general  sigh  of  relief  have  taken 
place  on  this  announcement,  and  it's  all  right,  I'm 
sure,  though  when  I  wrote  you  an  hour  ago  I  thought 
the  same  of  the  other  prospect. 


One  catches  one's  breath  a  little,  frankly,  at 
what  was  to  follow  the  above  within  a  few  days  - 
implying  as  it  does  that  she  had  drawn  upon  her 
self  some  fairly  direct  statement  of  her  corre 
spondent's  reserves  of  view  as  to  her  human  or 
"intellectual"  composition.  To  have  had  such 
reserves  at  such  an  hour,  and  to  have  responded 
to  the  invitation  to  express  them  —  for  invitation 
there  had  been  —  is  something  that  our  actual 
larger  light  quite  helps  us  to  flatter  ourselves  we 
shouldn't  have  been  capable  of.  But  what  was 
of  the  essence  between  these  admirable  persons 
was  exactly  the  tone  of  truth;  the  larger  light 
was  all  to  wait  for,  and  the  real  bearings  of  the 
hour  were  as  unapparent  as  the  interlocutors 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    503 

themselves  were  at  home  in  clearness,  so  far  as 
they  might  bring  that  ideal  about.  And  what 
ever  turn  their  conversation  took  is  to  the  honour 
always  of  the  generous  girl's  passion  for  truth. 
As  this  long  letter  admirably  illustrates  that,  I 
withdraw  from  it  almost  nothing.  The  record  of 
the  rare  commerce  would  be  incomplete  without 
it;  all  the  more  perhaps  for  the  wonder  and  pain 
of  our  seeing  the  noble  and  pathetic  young 
creature  have,  of  all  things,  in  her  predicament, 
to  plead  for  extenuations,  to  excuse  and  justify 
herself. 

I  understood  your  letter  perfectly  well  —  it  was 
better  than  I  feared  it  might  be,  but  bad  enough. 
Better  because  I  knew  already  all  it  told  me,  and  had 
been  afraid  there  might  be  some  new  and  horrible 
development  in  store  for  me  which  I  hadn't  myself 
felt;  but  bad  enough  because  I  find  it  in  itself,  new  or 
old,  such  a  disgusting  fact  that  I  am  intellectually  so 
unsympathetic.  It  is  a  fault  I  feel  profoundly  con 
scious  of,  but  one  that,  strange  to  say,  I  have  only  of 
late  been  conscious  of  as  a  fault.  I  dare  say  I  have 
always  known,  in  a  general  way,  that  I  am  very  un 
observant  about  things  and  take  very  little  interest 
in  subjects  upon  which  my  mind  doesn't  naturally 
dwell;  but  it  had  never  occurred  to  me  before  that  it 
is  a  fault  that  ought  to  be  corrected.  Whether  be 
cause  I  have  never  been  given  to  studying  myself 
much,  but  have  just  let  myself  go  the  way  my  mind 
was  most  inclined  to,  more  interested  in  the  subject 
itself  than  in  the  fact  that  it  interested  me;  or  whether 
because  one  is  averse  to  set  oneself  down  as  indolent 


504    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

and  egotistic  I  don't  know;  at  all  events  I  have  of 
late  seen  the  thing  in  all  its  unattractiveness,  and  I 
wish  I  could  get  over  it.  Do  you  think  that,  now  I 
am  fully  roused  to  the  fact,  my  case  is  hopeless?  Or 
that  if  I  should  try  hard  for  the  next  twenty -five  years 
I  might  succeed  in  modifying  it?  I  am  speaking  now 
of  a  want  of  interest  in  all  the  rest  of  the  world;  of 
not  having  the  desire  to  investigate  subjects,  naturally 
uninteresting  to  me,  just  because  they  are  interesting 
to  some  other  human  being  whom  I  don't  particularly 
owe  anything  to  except  that  he  is  a  human  being,  and 
so  his  thoughts  and  feelings  ought  to  be  respected  by 
me  and  sympathised  with.  Not  to  do  this  is,  I  know, 
unphilosophic  and  selfish,  conceited  and  altogether 
inhuman.  To  be  unselfish,  to  live  for  other  people,  to 
mould  our  lives  as  much  as  possible  on  the  model  of 
Christ's  all-embracing  humanity,  seems  most  clearly 
to  my  mind  the  one  thing  worth  living  for;  and  yet  it 
is  still  the  hardest  thing  for  me  to  do,  and  I  think  I 
do  it  less  than  anybody  else  who  feels  the  necessity  of 
it  strongly  at  all. 

I  am  glad  you  still  go  to  an  occasional  ball  —  I 
should  rather  like  to  meet  you  at  one  myself;  it's  a 
phase  of  life  we  have  seen  so  little  of  together.  I  have 
been  feeling  so  well  lately  that  I  don't  know  what  to 
make  of  it.  I  don't  remember  ever  in  my  life  being  in 
such  good  spirits.  Not  that  they  are  not  in  general 
pretty  natural  to  me  when  there  is  the  slightest  ex 
cuse  for  them,  but  now  everything  seems  bright  and 
happy,  my  life  so  full  of  interest,  my  time  so  thor 
oughly  filled  and  such  a  delicious  calm  to  have  settled 
down  on  my  usually  restless  spirit.  Such  an  enjoy 
ment  of  the  present,  such  a  grateful  contentment,  is  in 
each  new  day  as  I  see  it  dawn  in  the  east,  that  I  can 
only  be  thankful  and  say  to  myself:  "Make  a  note  of 
this  —  you  are  happy;  don't  forget  it,  nor  to  be  thank- 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    505 

ful  for  this  beautiful  gift  of  life."  This  is  Sunday 
morning,  and  I  wonder  whether  you  are  listening  to 
Phillips  Brooks.  I  understand  how  you  feel  about 
his  preaching  —  that  it  is  all  feeling  and  no  reason;  I 
found  it  so  myself  last  winter  in  Philadelphia:  he  was 
good  for  those  within  the  pale,  but  not  good  to  con 
vince  outsiders  that  they  should  come  in.  I  am  glad, 
however,  that  he  preaches  in  this  way  —  I  think  his 
power  lies  in  it;  for  it  seems  to  me,  after  all,  that  what 
comfort  we  get  from  religion,  and  what  light  we  have 
upon  it,  come  to  us  through  feeling,  that  is  through 
trusting  our  instinct  as  the  voice  of  God,  the  Holy 
Ghost,  though  it  may  at  the  same  time  appear  to  us 
directly  against  what  our  intellect  teaches  us.  I  don't 
mean  by  this  that  we  should  deny  the  conclusions  ar 
rived  at  by  our  intellect  —  which  on  the  contrary  I 
believe  we  should  trust  and  stand  by  to  the  bitter 
end,  whenever  this  may  be.  But  let  us  fearlessly 
trust  our  whole  nature,  showing  our  faith  in  God  by 
being  true  to  ourselves  all  through,  and  not  dishonour 
ing  Him  by  ignoring  what  our  heart  says  because  it 
is  not  carried  out  by  our  intellect,  or  by  wilfully  blunt 
ing  our  intellectual  perception  because  it  happens  to 
run  against  some  cherished  wish  of  our  heart. 

"But,"  you  will  say,  "how  can  a  man  live  torn  to 
pieces  this  way  by  these  contrary  currents?"  Well,  I 
know  it  is  hard  to  keep  our  faith  sure  of  a  standpoint 
where  these  apparent  inconsistencies  are  all  reconciled 
and  the  jangle  and  discord  sound  the  sweetest  harmony; 
but  I  do  believe  there  is  one,  in  God,  and  that  we  must 
only  try  to  have  that  faith  and  never  mind  how  great 
the  inconsistency  may  seem,  nor  how  perplexing  the 
maze  it  leads  us  through.  Let  us  never  give  up  one 
element  of  the  problem  for  the  sake  of  coming  to  a 
comfortable  solution  of  it  in  this  world.  I  don't 
blame  those  eager  minds  that  are  always  worrying, 


506    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

studying,  investigating,  to  find  the  solution  here  be 
low;  it  is  a  noble  work,  and  let  them  follow  it  out 
(and  without  a  bit  of  compromise)  to  whom  God  has 
given  the  work.  But  whether  we  find  it  or  not  I 
would  have  them  and  all  of  us  feel  that  it  is  to  be 
found,  if  God  wills  —  and  through  no  other  means 
surely  than  by  our  being  true.  Blessed  are  they  who 
have  not  seen  and  who  have  yet  believed.  But  I  am 
going  out  now  for  a  walk!  We  have  had  the  most 
delightful  weather  this  whole  week,  and  capital  sleigh 
ing,  and  I  have  spent  most  of  my  time  driving  myself 
about  with  that  same  dear  little  pony.  I  went  to 
town  yesterday  to  a  matinee  of  William  Tell;  it  was 
delightful  and  I  slept  all  night  after  it  too.  I  am  read 
ing  German  a  little  every  day,  and  it's  beginning  to  go 
pretty  well.  Good-bye.  Don't  tire  yourself  out  be 
tween  work  and  dissipation. 

I  find  myself  quite  sit  up  to  her,  as  we  have  it 
to-day,  while  she  sits  there  without  inconvenience, 
after  all  that  has  happened,  under  the  dead 
weight  of  William  Tell;  the  relief  of  seeing  her 
sublimely  capable  of  which,  with  the  reprieve 
from  her  formidable  flight  to  the  Pacific  doubtless 
not  a  little  contributing,  helps  to  draw  down  again 
the  vision,  or  more  exactly  the  sound,  of  the  old 
New  York  and  Boston  Opera  as  our  young  genera 
tion  knew  and  artlessly  admired  it;  admired  it, 
by  my  quite  broken  memories  of  the  early  time, 
in  Brignoli  the  sweet  and  vague,  in  Susini  the  deep 
and  rich,  in  Miss  Kellogg  the  native  and  charming, 
in  Adelaide  Phillipps  the  universal,  to  say  nothing 
of  other  acclaimed  warblers  (they  appear  to  me 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    507 

to  have  warbled  then  so  much  more  than  since) 
whom  I  am  afraid  of  not  placing  in  the  right 
perspective.  They  warbled  Faust  a  dozen  times, 
it  comes  back  to  me,  for  once  of  anything  else; 
Miss  Kellogg  and  Brignoli  heaped  up  the  measure 
of  that  success,  and  I  well  remember  the  great 
yearning  with  which  I  heard  my  cousin  describe 
her  first  enchanted  sense  of  it.  The  next  in  date 
of  the  letters  before  me,  of  the  last  day  but  one  of 
December  '69,  is  mainly  an  interesting  expression 
of  the  part  that  music  plays  in  her  mental  economy 
—  though  but  tentatively  offered  to  her  corre 
spondent,  who,  she  fears,  may  not  be  musical 
enough  to  understand  her,  understand  how  much 
"spiritual  truth  has  been  'borne  in'  upon  me  by 
means  of  harmony:  the  relation  of  the  part  to 
the  whole,  the  absolute  value  of  the  individual, 
the  absolute  necessity  of  uncompromising  and  un 
faltering  truth,  the  different  ways  in  which  we 
like  our  likes  and  our  unlikes,"  things  all  that 
have  been  so  made  clearer  to  her.  Of  a  singular 
grace  in  movement  and  attitude,  a  grace  of  free 
mobility  and  activity,  as  original  and  "uncon 
ventional"  as  it  was  carelessly  natural,  she  never 
looked  more  possessed  of  her  best  resources  than 
at  the  piano  in  which  she  delighted,  at  which  she 
had  ardently  worked,  and  where,  slim  and  straight, 
her  shoulders  and  head  constantly,  sympatheti 
cally  swaying,  she  discoursed  with  an  admirable 


508    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

touch  and  a  long  surrender  that  was  like  a  profes 
sion  of  the  safest  relation  she  could  know.  Com 
paratively  safe  though  it  might  have  been,  how 
ever,  in  the  better  time,  she  was  allowed  now,  I 
gather,  but  little  playing,  and  she  is  deep  again 
toward  the  end  of  January  '70  in  a  quite  other  ex 
posure,  the  old  familiar  exposure  to  the  "demon," 
as  she  calls  it,  "of  the  Why,  Whence,  Whither?" 
Long  as  the  letter  is  I  feel  it  a  case  again  for  pre 
sentation  whole;  the  last  thoughts  of  her  life,  as 
they  appear,  breathe  in  it  with  such  elevation. 
They  seem  to  give  us  her  last  words  and  impulses, 
and,  with  what  follows  of  the  middle  of  February, 
constitute  the  moving  climax  of  her  rich  short 
story. 

There  have  been  times  (and  they  will  come  again  no 
doubt)  when  I  could  write  to  you  about  ordinary 
things  in  a  way  at  least  not  depressing;  but  for  a  good 
while  now  I  have  felt  so  tired  out,  bodily  and  mentally, 
that  I  couldn't  conscientiously  ask  you  to  share  my 
mood.  The  life  I  live  here  in  the  country,  and  so  very 
much  alone,  is  capable  of  being  the  happiest  or  the 
unhappiest  of  existences,  as  it  all  depends  so  on  one 
self  and  is  so  very  little  interfered  with  by  outside  in 
fluences.  Perhaps  I  am  more  than  usually  subject  to 
extremes  of  happiness  and  of  depression,  yet  I  suppose 
everyone  must  have  moments,  even  in  the  most  varied 
and  distracting  life,  when  the  old  questioning  spirit, 
the  demon  of  the  Why,  Whence,  Whither?  stalks  in 
like  the  skeleton  at  the  feast  and  takes  a  seat  beside 
him.  I  say  everyone,  but  I  must  except  those  rare 
and  happy  souls  who  really  believe  in  Christianity,  who 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER     509 

no  longer  strive  after  even  goodness  as  it  comes  from 
one's  own  effort,  but  take  refuge  in  the  mysterious 
sacrifice  of  Christ,  his  merit  sufficing,  and  in  short 
throw  themselves  in  the  orthodox  way  on  the  consoling 
truth  of  the  Atonement  —  to  me  hitherto  neither  com 
prehensible  nor  desirable.  These  people,  having  com 
pletely  surrendered  self,  having  lost  their  lives,  as  it 
were  in  Christ,  must  truly  have  found  them,  must 
know  the  rest  that  comes  from  literally  casting  their 
care  of  doubt  and  strife  and  thought  upon  the  Lord. 

I  say  hitherto  the  doctrine  of  the  vicarious  suffering 
of  Christ  has  been  to  me  not  only  incomprehensible  but 
also  unconsoling;  I  didn't  want  it  and  didn't  under 
stand  even  intellectually  the  feeling  of  people  who  do. 
I  don't  mean  to  say  that  the  life  and  death  of  Christ 
and  the  example  they  set  for  us  have  not  been  to  me 
always  the  brightest  spot  in  history  —  for  they  have; 
but  they  have  stood  rather  as  an  example  that  we  must 
try  to  follow,  that  we  must  by  constant  and  ceaseless 
effort  bring  our  lives  nearer  to  —  but  always,  to  some 
extent  at  least,  through  ourselves,  that  is  through  our 
selves  with  God's  help,  got  by  asking  Him  for  it  and 
by  His  giving  it  to  us  straight  and  with  no  mediation. 
When  I  have  seen  as  time  went  by  my  own  short 
comings  all  the  more  instead  of  the  less  frequent,  I 
have  thought:  "Well,  you  don't  try  hard  enough; 
you  are  not  really  in  earnest  in  thinking  that  you  be 
lieve  in  the  Christian  life  as  the  only  true  one."  The 
more  I  tried,  nevertheless,  the  less  it  seemed  like  the 
model  life;  the  best  things  I  did  continued  to  be  the 
more  spontaneous  ones;  the  greatest  efforts  had  the 
least  success;  until  finally  I  couldn't  but  see  that  if 
this  was  Christianity  it  was  not  the  "rest"  that  Christ 
had  promised  his  disciples  —  it  was  nothing  more  than 
a  pagan  life  with  a  high  ideal,  only  an  ideal  so  high 
that  nothing  but  failure  and  unhappiness  came  from 
trying  to  follow  it.  And  one  night  when  I  was  awake 


510    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

through  all  the  hours  it  occurred  to  me:  What  if  this 
were  the  need  that  Christianity  came  to  fill  up  in  our 
hearts?  What  if,  after  all,  that  old  meaningless  form 
of  words  that  had  been  sounded  in  my  unheeding  ears 
all  my  days  were  suddenly  to  become  invested  with 
spirit  and  truth?  What  if  this  were  the  good  tidings 
that  have  made  so  many  hearts  secure  and  happy  in 
the  most  trying  situations?  For  if  morality  and  virtue 
were  the  test  of  a  Christian,  certainly  Christ  would 
never  have  likened  the  kingdom  of  heaven  to  a  little 
child,  in  whose  heart  is  no  struggle,  no  conscious  battle 
between  right  and  wrong,  but  only  unthinking  love 
and  trust. 

However  it  may  turn  out,  whether  it  shall  seem  true 
or  untrue  to  me  finally,  I  am  at  least  glad  to  be  able 
to  put  myself  intellectually  into  the  place  of  the  long 
line  of  Christians  who  have  felt  the  need  and  the  com 
fort  of  this  belief.  It  throws  a  light  upon  Uncle 
Henry's  talk,  which  has  seemed  to  me  hitherto  neither 
reasonable  nor  consoling.  When  I  was  with  him  it 
so  far  disgusted  me  that  I  fear  I  showed  him  plainly 
that  I  found  it  not  only  highly  unpractical,  but  ignoble 
and  shirking.  I  knew  all  the  while  that  he  disliked 
what  he  called  my  pride  and  conceit,  but  felt  all  the 
same  that  his  views  didn't  touch  my  case  a  bit,  didn't 
give  me  the  least  comfort  or  practical  help,  and  seemed 
to  me  wanting  in  earnestness  and  strength.  Now  I  say 
to  myself:  What  if  the  good  gentleman  had  all  along 
really  got  hold  of  the  higher  truth,  the  purer  spiritu 
ality?  Verily  there  are  two  sides  to  everything  in 
this  world,  and  one  becomes  more  charitable  the  older 
one  grows.  However,  if  I  write  at  this  length  it  is 
because  I  am  feeling  to-day  too  seedy  for  anything 
else.  I  had  a  hemorrhage  a  week  ago,  which  rather 
took  the  life  out  of  me;  but  as  it  was  the  only  one  I 
feel  I  should  by  this  time  be  coming  round  again  —  and 
probably  might  if  I  hadn't  got  into  a  sleepless  state 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    511 

which  completely  knocks  me  up.  The  old  consolatory 
remark,  "Patience,  neighbour,  and  shuffle  the  cards," 
ought  to  impart  a  little  hope  to  me,  I  suppose;  but  it's 
a  long  time  since  I've  had  any  trumps  in  my  hand,  and 
you  know  that  with  the  best  luck  the  game  always 
tired  me.  Willy  James  sometimes  tells  me  to  behave 
like  a  man  and  a  gentleman  if  I  wish  to  outwit  fate. 
What  a  real  person  he  is!  He  is  to  me  in  nearly  all 
respects  a  head  and  shoulders  above  other  people. 
How  is  Wendell  Holmes?  Elly  is  having  the  gayest 
winter  in  Washington  and  wants  me  to  go  to  them 
there,  which  I  had  meant  to  do  before  the  return  of 
my  last  winter's  illness.  But  it's  not  for  me  now. 

Later.  —  I  have  kept  my  letter  a  day  or  two,  think 
ing  I  might  feel  in  tune  for  writing  you  a  better  one 
and  not  sending  this  at  all.  But  alas  I  shall  have  to 
wait  some  time  before  I  am  like  my  old  self  again,  so 
I  may  as  well  let  this  go.  You  see  I'm  not  in  a  con 
dition,  mentally  or  physically,  to  take  bright  and 
healthy  views  of  life.  But  if  you  really  care  you  may 
as  well  see  this  mood  as  another,  for  heaven  only  knows 
when  I  shall  get  out  of  it.  Can  you  understand  the 
utter  weariness  of  thinking  about  one  thing  all  the 
time,  so  that  when  you  wake  up  in  the  morning  con 
sciousness  comes  back  with  a  sigh  of  "Oh  yes,  here  it 
is  again;  another  day  of  doubting  and  worrying,  hoping 
and  fearing  has  begun."  If  I  don't  get  any  sleep  at 
all,  which  is  too  frequently  the  case,  the  strain  is  a 
"leetle"  bit  too  hard,  and  I  am  sometimes  tempted  to 
take  a  drop  of  "pison"  to  put  me  to  sleep  in  earnest. 
That  momentary  vision  of  redemption  from  thinking 
and  striving,  of  a  happy  rest  this  side  of  eternity,  has 
vanished  away  again.  I  can't  help  it;  peaceful,  de 
sirable  as  it  may  be,  the  truth  is  that  practically  I 
don't  believe  it.  It  was  such  a  sudden  thing,  such  an 
entire  change  from  anything  that  had  ever  come  to  me 
before,  that  it  seemed  almost  like  an  inspiration,  and  I 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

waited,  almost  expecting  it  to  continue,  to  be  per 
manent.  But  it  doesn't  stay,  and  so  back  swings  the 
universe  to  the  old  place  —  paganism,  naturalism,  or 
whatever  you  call  the  belief  whose  watchword  is  "God 
and  our  own  soul."  And  who  shall  say  there  is  not 
comfort  in  it?  One  at  least  feels  that  here  one  breathes 
one's  native  air,  welcoming  back  the  old  human  feeling, 
with  its  beautiful  pride  and  its  striving,  its  despair, 
its  mystery  and  its  faith.  Write  to  me  and  tell  me 
whether,  as  one  goes  on,  one  must  still  be  tossed  about 
more  and  more  by  these  conflicting  feelings,  or  whether 
they  finally  settle  themselves  quietly  one  way  or  the 
other  and  take  only  their  proper  share  at  least  of  one's 
life.  This  day  is  like  summer,  but  I  should  enjoy  it 
more  if  last  night  hadn't  been  quite  the  most  unpleas 
ant  I  ever  spent.  I  got  so  thoroughly  tired  about  two 
in  the  morning  that  I  made  up  my  mind  in  despair  to 
give  the  morphine  another  trial,  and  as  one  dose  had 
no  effect  took  two;  the  consequence  of  which  is  that 
I  feel  as  ill  to-day  as  one  could  desire.  I  can  tell  you, 
sir,  you  had  better  prize  the  gift  of  sleep  as  it  deserves 
while  you  have  it.  If  I  don't  never  write  to  you  no 
more  you'll  know  it's  because  I  really  wish  to  treat 
you  kindly.  But  one  of  these  days  you'll  get  another 
kind  of  letter,  brim-full  perhaps  with  health  and  hap 
piness  and  thoroughly  ashamed  of  my  present  self. 
I  had  a  long  letter  yesterday  from  Harry  James  at 
Florence  —  enjoying  Italy  but  homesick.  Did  you 
see  those  verses  in  the  North  American  translated  from 
the  Persian?  Good-bye. 

The  last  of  all  is  full  both  of  realities  and 
illusions,  the  latter  insistently  living  through 
all  the  distress  of  the  former.  And  I  should 
like  to  say,  or  to  believe,  that  they  remained 
with  her  to  the  end,  which  was  near. 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    513 

Don't  be  alarmed  at  my  pencil  —  I  am  not  in  bed 
but  only  bundled-up  on  the  piazza  by  order  of  the 
doctor.  ...  I  started  for  New  York  feeling  a  good 
deal  knocked  up,  but  hoping  to  get  better  from  the 
change;   I  was  to  stay  there  over  Sunday  and  see  Dr. 
Metcalfe,  who  has  a  high  reputation  and  was  a  friend 
of  my  father's.     I  left  a  request  at  his  office  that  he 
would  come  to  me  on  Sunday  P.M.;  but  in  the  mean 
time  my  cousin  Mrs.  Minturn  Post,  with  whom  I  was 
staying,   urged  upon  me  her  physician,   Dr.   Taylor, 
who  came  on  Saturday  night,  just  as  I  was  going  to 
bed,  and,  after  sounding  my  lungs,  told  me  very  dread 
ful  things  about  them.     As  his  verdict  was  worse  than 
Metcalfe's  proved  I  will  tell  you  what  he  said  first. 
He  began  very  solemnly:  "My  dear  young  lady,  your 
right  lung  is  diseased;  all  your  hemorrhages  have  come 
from  there.     It  must  have  been  bad  for  at  least  a 
year  before  they  began.     You  must  go  to  Europe  as 
soon  as  possible."     This  was  not  cheerful,  as  I  had 
been  idiot  enough  to  believe  some  time  ago  such  a 
different    explanation.     But    of    course    I    wanted    to 
learn   what   he   absolutely   thought,    and   told   him   . 
wasn't  a  bit  afraid.     If  there  weren't  tubercles  was  I 
curable  and  if  there  were  was  I  hopeless?     I  asked 
him  for  the  very  worst  view  he  had  conscientiously  to 
take,  but  didn't  mean  definitely  to  ask  how  long  I 
should  live,  and  so  was  rather  unprepared  for  his  reply 
of  "Two  or  three  years."     I  didn't  however  wish  to 
make   him   regret   his   frankness,    so   I    said,    "Well, 
Doctor,  even  if  my  right  lung  were  all  gone  I  should 
make  a  stand  with  my  left,"  and  then,  by  way  of  show 
ing  how  valiant  the  stand  would  be,  fainted  away. 
This,  I  should  say,   was  owing  a  good  deal  to  my 
previous  used-up  condition  from  want  of  sleep.     It 
made  him  at  any  rate  hasten  to  assure  me  that  there 
was  every  possibility  of  my  case  being  not  after  all 
so  bad  —  with  which  he  took  his  departure;    to  my 


514    NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER 

great  relief  as  I  didn't  think  him  at  all  nice.  His 
grammar  was  bad,  and  he  made  himself  generally  ob 
jectionable. 

The  next  night  dear  Dr.  Metcalfe  came,  whom  I  love 
for  the  gentlest  and  kindest  soul  I  have  ever  seen. 
To  start  with  he's  a  gentleman,  as  well  as  an  excel 
lent  physician,  and  to  end  with  he  and  my  father  were 
fond  of  each  other  at  West  Point,  and  he  takes  a  sort 
of  paternal  interest  in  me.  He  told  me  that  my  right 
lung  is  decidedly  weaker  than  my  left,  which  is  quite 
sound,  and  that  the  hemorrhage  has  been  a  good 
thing  for  it  and  kept  it  from  actual  disease;  and  also 
that  if  I  can  keep  up  my  general  health  I  may  get  all 
right  again.  He  has  known  a  ten  times  worse  case  get 
entirely  well.  He  urged  me  not  to  go  to  Washington, 
but  decidedly  to  go  to  Europe;  so  this  last  is  what  I 
am  to  do  with  my  cousin  Mrs.  Post  if  I  am  not  dead 
before  June.  In  a  fortnight  I'm  to  go  back  to  New 
York  to  be  for  some  time  under  Metcalfe's  care.  I 
feel  tired  out  and  hardly  able  to  stir,  but  my  courage 
is  good,  and  I  don't  propose  to  lose  it  if  I  can  help,  for 
I  know  it  all  depends  on  myself  whether  I  get  through 
or  not.  That  is  if  I  begin  to  be  indifferent  to  what 
happens  I  shall  go  down  the  hill  fast.  I  have  fortu 
nately,  through  my  mother's  father,  enough  Irish  blood 
in  me  rather  to  enjoy  a  good  fight.  I  feel  the  greatest 
longing  for  summer  or  spring;  I  should  like  it  to  be 
always  spring  for  the  rest  of  my  life  and  to  have  all  the 
people  I  care  for  always  with  me!  But  who  wouldn't 
like  it  so?  Good-bye. 

To  the  gallantry  and  beauty  of  which  there  is 
little  surely  to  add.  But  there  came  a  moment, 
almost  immediately  after,  when  all  illusion  failed; 
which  it  is  not  good  to  think  of  or  linger  on,  and 


NOTES  OF  A  SON  AND  BROTHER    515 

yet  not  pitiful  not  to  note.  One  may  have 
wondered  rather  doubtingly  —  and  I  have  ex 
pressed  that  —  what  life  would  have  had  for  her 
and  how  her  exquisite  faculty  of  challenge  could 
have  "worked  in"  with  what  she  was  likely 
otherwise  to  have  encountered  or  been  confined 
to.  None  the  less  did  she  in  fact  cling  to  con 
sciousness;  death,  at  the  last,  was  dreadful  to 
her;  she  would  have  given  anything  to  live  - 
and  the  image  of  this,  which  was  long  to  remain 
with  me,  appeared  so  of  the  essence  of  tragedy 
that  I  was  in  the  far-off  aftertime  to  seek  to  lay 
the  ghost  by  wrapping  it,  a  particular  occasion 
aiding,  in  the  beauty  and  dignity  of  art.  The 
figure  that  was  to  hover  as  the  ghost  has  at  any 
rate  been  of  an  extreme  pertinence,  I  feel,  to  my 
doubtless  too  loose  and  confused  general  picture, 
vitiated  perhaps  by  the  effort  to  comprehend 
more  than  it  contains.  Much  as  this  cherished 
companion's  presence  among  us  had  represented 
for  William  and  myself  -  -  and  it  is  on  his  behalf 
I  especially  speak  —  her  death  made  a  mark  that 
must  stand  here  for  a  too  waiting  conclusion. 
We  felt  it  together  as  the  end  of  our  youth, 

THE   END 


, 


IJB 


14  DAY  USE 

RETURN  TO  DESK  FROM  WHICH  BORROWED 

HUMANITIES  GRADUATE 
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T«l.  No.  642-4481 

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